Everything and the kitchen sink as a service: Trends an IT asset manager should be aware of

Publishers offer anything you (n)ever imagined “as a Service”. The list goes on and on, making your life more difficult with every development you read about on LinkedIn.

Recording, optimising (rightsizing) and managing these gems is going to be a challenge for the ITAM teams. Where traditional ITAM (or Software Asset Management) focuses on the correct use of assets according to legal agreements, the focus radically shifts when (dark) clouds appear on the horizon. Regarding cloud infrastructures, the focus of ITAM shifts from compliance towards Cloud Consumption Management & Optimisation. 

While only up to 20% of enterprise applications are cloud based at present, a move towards the cloud can be expected the upcoming years. This increasing shift towards cloud-based solutions means your ITAM processes will need to become even more finely tuned and nuanced in order to adapt. So which cloud developments should you keep track of from an ITAM perspective? Here are some trends to watch:
 

Hybrid Multicloud solutions

Establishing the inevitable increase in cloud adoption, customers look at hybrid or multicloud environments and possibilities suiting their needs in the most cost-efficient way and best fit for purpose. Publishers seem to have accepted this multicloud strategy as some key. Publishers already announced solutions that allow customers to run parts of the same workload in different cloud environments. Publishers want to make sure they get their piece of the pie. 

Multicloud strategies will allow customers to operate in a cloud-agnostic way and make use of different clouds fulfilling their needs. As customers may use different clouds or cloud-solutions in parallel, recording, optimising and managing the cloud will become an even bigger challenge relating to ITAM since all environments should be managed and maintained seamlessly.
 

Portable Containers

Container solutions and strategies are increasing as well, as publishers put more emphasis on packaged application solutions. Systems to deploy, scale and manage applications in (cloud-ready) containers are being released and becoming generally available for customers.

Containers offer a way for companies to get workloads into a cloud, shift workloads between clouds and create flexibility and portability within a Multicloud or Hybrid cloud environment. This way, a cloud-vendor lock-in can be prevented and the search for what suits the business best can be very clean and objective.
 

Collaborating for cloud optimisation

Because of the shift in spending towards various IT solutions as a service, it is easy to lose track of IT spend and added value to the business of a specific service. Optimising spend is key, taking into account the specific value a service is providing. Infrastructure specialists, architects, asset managers should work together to budget, forecast and plan for cloud expenses.