ITIL and Cloud Computing

ITIL and Cloud Computing Series - Part 1

I had heard about Cloud Computing which is also often referred to as Cloud. I was aware that it is the 'next big thing'. I was not very sure what it covered and how ITIL would impact it or how it would impact ITIL.

Recently I got an opportunity to work for a cloud initiative. I realised it is a old wine in a new bottle. The technology existed. Lot of things which we perceived as an IT service earlier was now a cloud offering. A simplest of examples could be the hosting services.

Cloud computing is an internet based computing which shares resources, hardware and/or software and provisions the same on demand. The concept originates from virtualization technology, which could be either software or hardware virtualization, meant towards optimising the utilisation of computing power and/or storage. It covers dynamic on demand provisioning of scalable resources over the internet or intranet.

Types of Cloud:

1. Private Cloud – Cloud infrastructure is owned by the organization itself.
2. Public Cloud – Cloud infrastructure is owned by a Third Party.
3. Hybrid Cloud – This uses both Public and Private Clouds, i.e for an organization a portion of its services which are critical or sensitive are hosted on internal infrastructure or Private Cloud and the portion which is non-critical or non-sensitive is hosted on external infrastructure or Public Cloud.

With cloud computing the importance of service delivery processes changes. The focus shifts to “Service”. Earlier, various components of IT infrastructure as a CI were important. For cloud computing Service as a CI has become utmost important. Thus, Service reliability has become important for the customer from cloud perspective.

Now coming back to my other confusion on ITIL and cloud computing. I do not see any impact on fundamentals of ITIL from cloud computing or vice versa. ITIL will now gain even more importance as efficient service management will be the key to success of any cloud initiative. Like any IT infrastructure which is benefited by ITIL implementation, cloud would also be benefited by implementing ITIL framework. We do not need to define a new version of ITIL for cloud. ITIL V3 framework is well laid to manage the challenges arising out of the cloud buzz word.

...To be continued...