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Moving to SaaS for IT service management
Paul Avenant reviews some of the key considerations
for moving from a traditional software delivery model to SaaS
Paul Avenant |
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is more than just a cloud-based
delivery model. It is a service approach that IT organizations are considering
for meeting their IT service management needs. With a SaaS model, IT organizations
can focus their staff and infrastructure on high-priority activities and initiatives
while still enjoying access to IT service management productivity solutions.
Typical SaaS models allow a service to be hosted, delivered, and managed remotely
via the Web and offer the sharing of application processing and storage resources
through a subscription service.
Before you transition to a SaaS model, it’s important
to understand how that approach will support your requirements, what trade-
offs you may need to make and whether it offers you the flexibility to move
to and from other service delivery approaches at various points in time.
In-house IT service management or SaaS?
How do you decide whether to implement IT service management in-house or subscribe
to it as a service? The answer depends on the type, level, and cost of the IT
skills within your organization; the budget for capital versus operational expenses;
the likelihood of growth in your IT infrastructure; and the level of customization
and integration that your workflows and processes require into other elements
of your IT infrastructure and management solutions.
IT organizations that should consider subscribing to IT service management via
a SaaS model have many of the following needs:
- Lack of time, budget or staff to implement configuration
management database (CMDB) platforms or multiple discovery and event management
systems into their own IT service management solutions
- Need to reduce or avoid capital expenses for purchasing
additional hardware and software
- Require SAS 70 or ISO 27002 data security but lack
the staff or skills to implement it in-house
- Have variable requirements for IT service management
capabilities or face unpredictable growth in their IT service management needs
Identify the motivation for choosing SaaS
You must understand the key drivers that are causing you to think about SaaS,
because they are likely to drive many other related decisions in running your
enterprise. SaaS is often used as a generic term, and it means different things
to different people. To find out what SaaS means to you, it’s important
to address the following questions:
- Are you trying to shift capital expenses to operating
expenses?
- Do you need to deal with a shortage of skilled resources
for managing or administering your systems?
- Do you believe that most of your costs are in buying
and running the hardware and software? Or do you believe that most of your
costs go toward the ongoing staffing cost for the people that actually operate
your help desk and other key IT service management processes?
- Do you have a strong preference or constraints around
whether you host the hardware and software (including data) on premises or
off premises?
- Is your biggest challenge around getting your software
up and running quickly?
To make the most well-informed decision for your organization, you must first
identify what is motivating you to move to a SaaS model. With SaaS for IT service
management, you can reduce the cost of software and the cost of running that
software. However, this is just one area of cost savings. According to Gartner’s
IT Key Metrics Data, the IT service desk accounts for about 4% of the total
IT budget. Since 86% of the cost of an IT service desk is staffing-related,
that means 3.88% of the total IT budget is spent on IT service desk staff. The
other 14% of the cost of an IT service desk consists mostly of the hardware
and software associated with running IT service and support.
Therefore, it is important that you also look at your total costs holistically,
because the largest portion of an IT budget is generally reflected in the people-related
costs of operations. Solutions that also enable significant productivity gains
for those people can realize substantially higher return on investment from
such operational efficiencies than solutions that offer only pure cost reduction
on the software.
Identify your requirements for a flexible service model
Think about the kind of flexibility and business protection SaaS provides to
your organization. It’s important to factor in the cost of actually switching
from your current model to the SaaS solution. This should be looked at in terms
of retraining staff and migrating data. That’s why you should consider
the kind of flexibility you have to move among different service delivery models—everything
from on-premises to off-premises, from perpetual to term licenses, from you
providing the staffing to an outsourcer providing the staffing. Look for offerings
that allow you to do this with a single tool. Over a three- to five-year period,
you may want to move from one model to another without starting over every time
and losing all your investment.
Look for solutions across service delivery models
Ideally, you should be able to move across from on-premises perpetual licenses,
to off-premises subscriptions, to fully outsourced processes as your needs change
and still have a consistent data model where your data can be protected and
reused.
It’s important to use consistent processes in all three areas, and you
should have some investment protection. In this way, you can move among those
three models at various points in time without starting from scratch or losing
your investment in process development, training, or unused contract payments.
Why would an IT organization move from one model to another? That would depend
on changes in the business environments. At the moment, you might be under a
lot of pressure to reduce capital expenses, compelling you to search for ways
to shift funds to operational expenses. This might motivate you to move to a
SaaS model where you do not need to make an investment in hardware, software,
or capital expenditures. However, that situation could be different two to three
years from now.
It’s not unusual for an organization to outsource one year and later on
decide to bring everything back in house because of an acquisition or merger.
If you approach SaaS as a pay-as-you-go service and then decide to switch back
to your previous model, make sure your vendor can provide options as your situation
changes.
What to look for
SaaS IT service management solutions should easily and cost-effectively integrate
with on-premises tools to find and fix problems that can disrupt critical services,
and do so proactively and automatically wherever possible.
In addition, the solutions should be able to leverage a CMDB that stores information
about the existence and current configuration of IT assets. This single, centralized
source of accurate information about the IT infrastructure helps to reduce the
confusion that results from having multiple, conflicting sources of information
about an organization’s IT assets.
It’s also important that the solutions delivered via SaaS be able to share
data with various applications to authorize, perform, and monitor changes to
the IT infrastructure. In addition, the solutions should provide preconfigured,
out-of-the-box, ITIL-compliant capabilities that include incident, problem,
change, release, asset, service request, service level, and knowledge management
processes. The solutions should also be able to offer flexible integration options,
including, but not limited to, Web services that deal with large data volume
demands.
Security-related concerns
Be sure to address security issues related to a SaaS model and identify your
level of comfort with the type of data protection that is delivered. An important
priority is to have customer data secured in a data center that is certified
under SAS 70 Type II for meeting the ISO 27002 standards for physical security,
control of restricted areas, management of human resources, data security and
confidentiality, and other critical measures.
The data should be kept on a separate physical or virtual server that is protected
by intrusion detection and prevention systems, as well as have passwords and
encryption using IP SEC or a minimum of AES 256-bit encryption. The provider
should offer backups, disaster recovery, and business service continuity plans
to assure system availability.
Putting it all together
SaaS is a viable choice for IT service management, as both a delivery and a
business-model option. If it fits your organization’s needs in terms of
your goals, then the SaaS delivery model should be pursued.
What if you don’t have the skill set to achieve your objectives in-house,
but your requirements dictate that you maintain an on-premises solution? You
may want to consider a managed service offering that lets someone else manage
the system on premises for you—often on your servers—without requiring
your staff resources to maintain the solution.
In addition, be sure not to focus exclusively on the cost savings or ROI associated
with the hardware, the software, and the associated administration costs. These
are important, but you can achieve significantly greater business value by also
selecting a solution that has proven capabilities for improving the efficiency
and effectiveness of your service desk staff and the core processes.
Final thoughts
The solutions delivered via SaaS should be able to provide integrated asset
and change management, as well as a service desk and incident and problem management.
They should also provide self-service, include asset configuration management
for inventory tracking, and integrate with a CMDB. With SaaS delivery for IT
service management, IT can benefit from having a single, central, shared data
model and a unified service view across all functions and processes through
the CMDB—in addition to leveraging a unique, unified architecture with
no point-to-point interfaces to maintain.
Just as IT service management helps make the enterprise more efficient and responsive,
the methods by which the solutions are deployed and maintained can have a major
impact on your company’s profitability and IT performance. IT organizations
that lack the in-house staff or scale to cost-effectively support the IT service
management infrastructure should consider the benefits of a SaaS delivery model.
SaaS can be a great option that allows your IT organization to get up and running
faster, particularly if you do not have the necessary skill set in-house. This
can also provide a way to help you focus on the core problems you want to solve.
Consider selecting a vendor that has best practices already baked into the solutions
from the beginning, which can provide a standardized IT Infrastructure Library
(ITIL)-based configuration to get you started. Avoid a SaaS offering where you
need to heavily customize the solution to get fairly basic capabilities to meet
your needs. Your business needs will change over time, so it is particularly
important to look for a vendor that provides you the opportunity to move easily,
cost-effectively, and rapidly from one service delivery model to another.
The author is Senior Vice President, Enterprise Service
Management Products and Strategy at BMC Software
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