A good customer said something recently that really got my attention:

“IT infrastructure is moving quickly toward becoming delivered through a service model. Machines are becoming virtual running in secure data centers on large, partitionable machines.  Self-provisioned virtual IT resources are the key to success for a service model, which requires all aspects of the physical hardware to be abstracted or partitioned with permissions and given only to a tenant of the service.”

– Eric Miller, CEO, Genesis Hosting

That is certainly a tall order, but underpinning this direction is the value to both end users and IT infrastructure providers of the self-service model of operations. The commercial service provider market, for example, Amazon S3, has used this model to successfully enable thousands upon thousands of organizations to buy IT services whether server, storage or networking on a “per drink” basis.

As end user organizations consider what the right solution is for them, I would like to offer a few questions to help identify the best means by which long term value and resiliency can be achieved:

·         Which architecture best supports these solutions?

·         What are the implications of self-service for product features and function?

·         What are the technical and management implications of a self-service based hosting model wherein the IaaS provider performs all           provisioning, configuration and management of virtualized IT resources?

A key driver in the on-going transformation of IT infrastructure is how to maintain resiliency in the face of the broad range of customers that need to be  supported while ensuring long-term cost efficiency.