Ubiquitous public cloud services are making stronger strides into the world of business technology, and enterprises are increasingly looking to cloud services to help them succeed. Cloud services stretch across the business value chain, including ideation, prototyping, product development, business planning, go-to-market strategy, marketing, finance, and strategic growth. Consumption patterns vary by service. For the past few years, the businesses has owned certain services, in some cases without keeping their technology management teams in loop — AKA “shadow IT”. Every business unit engages in this behavior, each one sourcing the various services they use from multiple providers. As a result, today’s businesses face a complex array of cloud services, each with their own business functions and requirements. The emerging cloud landscape does not provide a “single pane of glass” for the tech management team and lacks a standard governance model across services. Finally, it does not allow firms to compare costs for a standard service, which could result in suboptimal spending. This situation is creating a need for what we call “cloud orchestration solutions”. Such a solution would provide:

  • A single window on all cloud services. It merges all required and approved service types from multiple cloud service providers into a single portal, much like the ITSM service portals that offered services built within an organization.
  • Information on the service provider most suited to a given workload.
  • Comparison of services across service providers.
  • Consistent governance models across services.
  • Control over service life cycles and thus service cost.

What’s the situation at your enterprise? If you’re a tech vendor or an outsourcing service provider, what are you seeing at your customers’ organizations? How do you see the environment shaping up? Please share your comments, practices, and setups.