B. Service Portfolio Management
The purpose of a service portfolio is to describe a service provider’s services in terms of the business value and needs. In order to assess the needs and requirements of the diverse departments who wish to utilize and use certain cloud computing, the portfolio management should contain all necessary information that are required to assess which cloud model is efficient to deploy and compare service competitiveness & effectiveness across different providers. It is essential that a portfolio be created for all potential external cloud deployment models. Service Portfolio Management process gathers as and analyzes the cloud service provider services in the market and ensures that the service provider has the right mix of services to meet the required business outcomes at an appropriate level of investment. The service catalogue must be regularly updated to reflect all live cloud computing services available.
C. Financial Management for IT Se it ices
The main objective of the financial management process is to provide a cost effective administration of the assets and resources used in providing IT services. It manages the service's budgeting, accounting and charging requirements.
The aim of the financial management is to assist management decision on IT investment by providing detailed cost analysis regarding changes to IT services.
One of the key features of cloud computing is based on the fact that its charging is based on consumption (pay as you go). Financial management process must be changed to incorporate this fact when it peruses cost analysis calculation. The financial management process needs to provide the necessary cost information in order to decide whether a certain service in the cloud can be deployed more efficiently and able to save the costs over more traditional areas of IT. Consumer financial manager with the help of the service user must collaborate to calculate the potential costs of a new cloud service to ensure they will indeed provide measurable cost saving. Since the cloud computing model charges on pay as you go bases the financial management budgeting activity must be changed to incorporate this model of charging.
IT accounting and customers need information related to the consumption bill and details about what and how the cloud service provider has billed them for. The IT accounting is fully responsible about explaining how is the money is spent by customer, service, etc. The cloud service provider needs to have a well-defined and implemented billing process to satisfy the IT accounting and customer needs.
D. Demand Management
The main objective of the demand management process is to understand, anticipate and influence business demand for services. It does that by analyzing patterns of activities and user profiles and provisioning capacity in line with strategic business objectives Demand Management works with Capacity Management process in the Service Design service to ensure that services have sufficient capacity to meet the required demand. One key promise of the cloud computing is that any request for modification or deletion of the existing capacity or resources has to be done in real time. Also, the cloud service provider must fulfill any sudden surge in the service demand without compromising the agreed
performance. This is an excellent feature from the demand management’s point of view but the cloud consumers must be very careful as the cloud service provider normally charges any usage over the agreed levels at a premium rate. The demand management must carefully calculate demand to allocate the agreed budget within the financial management process.
When using the cloud, the performance requirements for a cloud scrvice must be accurately defined, especially within the peak period (low or high) and must be clearly articulated in the Servicc Level Agreement (SLA). Failing to calculate and define the required performance is a sourcc of risk and could lead to obstruction or complete damage the consumer business.
E. Business Relationship Management
In the traditional ITSM the Business Relationship Management process identifies the needs of existing and potential customers and ensures that appropriate services are
developed to meet those needs.
In the cloud environments, the purpose of the Business Relationship Management process is extended to form and uphold the cloud service provider and the customer business relationship. The Business Relationship Manager (BRM) identifies customer requirements and makes sure that the cloud servicc provider meets the requirements before agreeing to deliver the service. If business requirements changes over time the BRM ensures that the scrvice provider is aware of changing business needs and help the business in expressing the value of a service. The objectives of the BRM include:
• Ensure that the cloud service provider understands the customer’s perspective of service, and is therefore able to prioritize its services assets appropriately
• Guarantee that the cloud service provider is meeting the customer’s requirements and business needs otherwise establish formal complains and escalation process for the customer
• Establish and maintain a constructive relationship between the cloud service provider and the customer based on understanding the customer and its business drivers
• Identify changes to the customer needs that could potentially impact the type, level, or utilization of the cloud services provided
• Establish and articulate business requirements for new services or charges to existing Services
VII. CONCLUSION
Adopting cloud computing is a serious business decision.
IT scrvice management frameworks such as 1T1L is essential and plays a critical role to manage the cloud computing. Although 1TIL has been around for almost 20 years it must be reframed and consider the context of the cloud computing. The cloud computing will not change ITIL service strategy objectives, the ITIL servicc strategy processes should be revamped on the light of the above discussion. Performing careful scrvice strategy will reduce the possibility of exposing the business to unnecessary complexities with no accountability for the end services being delivered and poses