ServiceNow (ITAPP)

The hybrid cloud industry is rapidly beginning to transform IT departments into the long-promised IT service-provider model. In our conversations with industry experts and the media, the consensus is that public cloud is the future of IT. For example, AWS is heavily touting their all-in AWS program, further proving that the adoption of public cloud is growing rapidly. However, as organizations start to adopt public cloud technologies, they may not necessarily be all-in from the get go. As the shift takes place, they still maintain their current private cloud infrastructure – setting up a hybrid cloud environment. In many cases they do so due to compliance and security reasons. Additionally, many organizations are still inclined to run critical applications on their in-house infrastructure, the so-called “buy the base and rent the peak” model to provide the optimal cost structure for data center resources. Public cloud provides enterprises the choice and ability to rent additional resources when demand for those resources peaks.

Buy the base and rent the peak model provides the optimal cost structure for consumption across public and private cloud resources, and the right cloud management tool can help enterprises in achieving it.

Use of public cloud doesn’t mean that IT is going away. Compliance, security, and cost control are important aspects of IT and the onus of them fall squarely in the lap of IT teams. The challenge becomes greater because we live in a hybrid IT world. End-users want IT to be agile, and to deliver things at the click a button. This is the true promise of cloud and end-users want to see it. To achieve this, IT has to provide a single pane of glass from which to deliver IT services (infrastructure, platforms, and DevOps resources) across private and public cloud assets. Private datacenters must however close the “service gap” that exists in how they deliver IT services as compared to public cloud. This makes it critical to select the right cloud management platform that delivers this single-pane-of-glass, and allows on-demand access to the mix of resources, which provide choice, agility, and flexibility without compromising on security, governance, and compliance requirements.

As the market continues to evolve, it is difficult to find a single vendor that delivers an end-to-end cloud solution. As organizations make the move to effectively use public cloud along with their private data centers, they need to look for the right partner who will help them address today’s challenges, and is versatile enough to evolve with them as they grow. There are many vendors in the cloud management space, and many provide limited options because the success of their offerings is tied to the usage of their own platform. For example, some organizations are tied to their own virtualization platform, and work great for those specific environments. However this may not be a good option for organizations that are looking to manage public cloud resources. Other vendors work best when their offerings are tied to its networking and platform solutions. This would be a great fit for a company already using that vendor’s technology, but not flexible enough for others looking to implement solutions from other vendors. Enter ServiceNow. Many customers already see ServiceNow as a single pane of glass to manage their interactions with IT. When it comes to cloud, ServiceNow is not tied to a single infrastructure and cloud provider. It is uniquely positioned to manage multiple technologies across multiple providers, allowing it to become the single pane of glass for the delivery and management of infrastructure, platform, and DevOps services. Hybrid cloud is the future of IT, and in order to achieve success in this new realm, organizations have to identify and work with the right long-term partner who will help them transform their IT into a service provider model and optimally deliver IT services across public cloud and private data centers.