Organizations would like a flexible technology environment that can adapt and respond quickly to changing business needs. To do this, IT should provide just-in-time access to infrastructure and applications and ensure seamless service delivery.
There are two solutions and both have critical issues: in a brokered model, in which IT acts as an intermediary, approvals, manual processes and the provision of services take a long time due to staff already overburdened with requests.
In a direct model, in which users are left with complete procurement autonomy, there is the risk of losing control over activations and spending, generating shadow IT, with security and budget risks.
We help companies by enabling IT as-a-Service (ITaaS) models with the structuring and configuration of a self-service IT portal that can rapidly deliver IT resources and services to end users.
The visibility and control of spending and uses favor governance and the identification of best practices for the services provided, offering superior quality experiences.
WHAT DIFFICULTIES DO USERS ENCOUNTER IN ACCESSING IT RESOURCES?
Slow provisioning
It can take days or even weeks before the request for activation of resources or a service by a business unit is taken over. The number of projects can be overwhelming and it is often difficult to quickly determine the best path to follow.
IT staff overwhelmed with demands
Most IT teams actually operate where they are constantly required to do more with fewer resources. The lack of standardization of hybrid IT environments does not allow to automate recurring tasks.
Difficulty in monitoring use and spending
Users are geographically distributed and with different organizational models, so without a centralized control tool over the services required and the expenses they generate, it is difficult to establish governance best practices.
Poor experience
People must always go through IT and they do so using unstructured tools (email, telephone), which do not allow to track the timing of taking charge, the progress of the processes and the results in an overview.
Standardization of hybrid environments
Where in the past there were two components involved, the monolithic application and the server, today there are dozens of microservices on distributed infrastructures. Given the coexistence of on-premise and cloud-distributed infrastructures, even among multiple suppliers, the first step is to standardize and centralize their management in a single platform, from which to have full visibility on uses and spending.
You need the continuous availability of HW, SW and cloud inventories that are constantly updated, aggregated and normalized from multiple sources and the integration with contractual and financial data: in this way you have – in a single view – all the information necessary for plan renewals and optimize any waste.
Structuring of IT Service Management and DevOps processes
The second step is to analyze the workflows of IT staff involved in the provision of IT resources and services. We try to structure policies and processes, reviewing existing workflows according to IT Service Management and DevOps best practices, to make them more efficient, measurable and improvable.
We then bring the revised processes to a digital platform from which we manage the provision of resources and services through a single interface for the end user, from which you can easily advance and monitor your requests.
Setting up a Self Service Portal
Through the portal, we allow users to select the desired services from a service catalog, which can be “fixed” or “dynamic”. For example, we can provide for the automatic provisioning of applications as part of the distribution of services and set limited choices based on membership of a particular group (eg less sophisticated users).
Development teams can independently request new virtual machines or cloud instances, as well as restart their infrastructure resources, without having to involve IT.
Delivery automation
After having prepared a catalog of standardized services that can be requested through a self-service interface, we automate delivery, to reduce costs and improve the quality of the service. We free IT from cumbersome manual processes by automating the distribution of new workloads or applications.
We do not limit ourselves to provisioning, but we automatically manage the entire life cycle of the service: the initial request, approval, governance of the attributes to comply with corporate identification standards, modification / disposal of resources. At each step the parties in the game are notified and in proximity of the established expiration date, the system automatically notifies the administrators and owners and provides for their renewal with a click, avoiding continuing to pay for resources no longer needed.
Spending control
When making the request, the user can select a series of information (CPU number, amount of memory, storage level, SLA, applicability of specific company standards and the required deadline). For each service requested, we also provide an estimate of the annual cost, which is dynamic depending on the elements included in the request.
We can set up quota-based approval flows: if the service falls within the organization’s (or user’s) quota, the process continues automatically, otherwise it can generate a rejection or request additional levels of approval. This allows us to maintain full control of spending and to analyze and identify cost optimization practices.