ITIL V3 or ITIL V4?

Sometime back words put forth by a very senior guy "ITIL V4 will be released next year. It will cover ITIL for cloud offerings" caught me off-guard. Being an ITIL expert, a senior consultant, I should have known the upcoming things or new releases for my domain. My experience said ITIL V4 is not possible as of now. ITIL V3 itself has not reached a maturity level. We are still in the process of phasing out ITIL V2. How can then we be talking about a new ITIL version altogether? Otganisations have started investing to upgrade their system to ITIL V3. How will their investments be justified? Is ITIL V3 a failure?

All these questions were troubling me. They should definitely be as the words on ITIL V4 have come from a guy much senior to me, with a consulting profile much stronger than me. What acted as a salt to my bruises further enhancing my agony was his claim of being part of OGC's ITIL V4 initiative. 

I was even told that ITIL V4 is covering all aspects of Cloud Computing. This triggered another question in my  mind - Why and how should ITIL best practices change for Cloud Computing?

I started my research moment I was free the things that had been keeping me busy. I got my clarity. I was correct. There was no ITIL V4. OGC was coming up with a new release or rather I should say probably a new revamped edition of ITIL V3 core volumes. The website clearly articulated that "there is no ITIL V4" and that "A new release of ITIL V3 (new edition of the publications) would be released next year".

Official News From OGC on ITIL V4

ITIL Mandate For Change - An Update To Core Publications 

If we revisit the ITIL V3 core volumes, one can easily make out that its quality reflected that it was a hush-hush release just like the OS releases from Microsoft. It looked as if the delivery targets were being missed so something was delivered to the customer (ITIL Community in this case). It was lacking on quality parameters in every sense, when we compare it to the two core volumes of ITIL V2. It definitely needed an update. And the OGC's initiative to revamp the core volumes should be appreciated.

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...