Published: May 14 2012, 09:00 AM | no comments
by Roger Pilc

Consumer driven IT presents enterprise IT with stiff challenges.  While consumerization wins accolades for empowering users, mobilizing the enterprise, boosting productivity, and shaving costs, it’s also ratcheted up the demand for IT to deliver new, innovative services at the speed of business. Cloud computing offers the opportunity to bridge the gap, but with consumer-friendly social and cloud apps that help users bypass IT controls, companies need to respond quickly to the emerging trend. And they need an IT infrastructure that provides the business agility to do so—all without losing sight of a core tenet that’s pressured most IT shops since the recession: “Do more with less.”

Here’s the good news. These industry forces do not pose insurmountable problems. I led a session at CA World in November that covered several real-world examples of how companies are tapping consumer driven IT to drive desired business outcomes. If there was a common lynchpin to those success stories, it was their use of automation solutions.

Many organizations have discovered that virtualization helps reduce costs and support agility. This is, however, just a first step. Once an organization has embraced virtualization, it is well positioned to exploit automation to deliver cloud services for previously unachievable levels of speed, innovation, and cost efficiencies.

Essentially, the organization can move from simply managing infrastructure to optimizing the delivery of business services through the cloud. It’s a high order achievement that can support the consumer-driven enterprise in three ways: cloud automation, client automation, and managing complexity.

Cloud Automation

The cloud fosters a self-service approach to IT and puts the end consumer in control. At a fundamental level, cloud transforms IT infrastructure, objects, functions and processes into services that can be easily acquired and metered, with costs that are easily understood and controlled.

But unlike the movie “Field of Dreams”, if you build it, these benefits won’t necessarily come. You need to enable them with specific technologies to automate and orchestrate delivery of IT and business services across heterogeneous physical, virtual, and cloud resources.

For example, CA Automation Suite for Clouds helps IT teams deliver cloud services, so they can accelerate time to market and get applications into production more quickly. Its cloud management, security, and orchestration capabilities unify cloud automation and simplify the management of multiple clouds in a single interface.

Client Automation

Client automation includes managing a wide and growing variety of client devices and myriad application delivery methodologies, whether application virtualization or workspace management.

Along with requisite security solutions, client automation gives IT teams a means to manage users’ access to information, applications, and resources—all in a way governed by where they are, what device they’re using, and what resources they want access to.

One example I like to share is of a company that had some 200 people supporting desktops throughout their organization. They transitioned to a self-service virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offered via a service catalog. They’ve since eliminated manual desktop administration, and have been able to cut 10% of that group’s staffing costs, while improving service and user satisfaction levels. What’s not to like?

Managing Complexity

The third way automation supports business demand is in managing complexity. Automation can bring about truly dramatic improvements to management of IT, even for IT administrators. For illustration purposes, consider how our CA AppLogic cloud platform and CA Process Automation tools can streamline how IT administrators manage complex tasks.

The CA AppLogic platform lets developers design and test complex applications with the middleware and system configuration they’ll have in production. IT administrators can then create or choose business outcomes at the press of a button, as opposed to having to manage a process for acquiring, configuring, and delivering applications, OSes, firewalls, and networking gear.

CA Process Automation lets administrators think about IT tasks as objects. They can engineer their workflows, and then control, govern, monitor, and remediate those processes. Once defined, they can reuse them in building more complex, higher-level business processes—just as application developers reuse code to speed delivery of new software.

In the end, automation offers companies a top-down, service-driven approach to dealing with consumer driven IT and cloud delivery for greater business agility. It helps organizations realize once unachievable levels of speed and cost efficiencies. Most important, automation helps evolve an organization from managing infrastructure to optimizing the delivery of business services. And that is the crucial differentiator for reaping the promise of consumer driven IT.