At the three recent EMEA NowForums ServiceNow Chief Technology Officer Arne Josefsberg spoke of "The Enterprise IT Cloud." A mix of where cloud is today and where it will be in the future — that cloud is transforming the role and capabilities of the enterprise IT organization. And along with machine learning, big data, the internet of things, and machine-to-machine communication it will help IT transform the enterprise.
Where are we with cloud adoption?
Cloud adoption has been rapid and it will continue to grow at great pace — the statistics below are from IDC, a global research firm:
Source — IDC: Buyer Market Guide: Cloud Service, doc #241838, July 2013
But not all clouds are created equal
So what differentiates Enterprise IT Cloud?
Arne believes that enterprise IT cloud has five key tenets:
- Data isolation — the logical isolation of customer data and applications (but still with a need for cloud cost efficiencies through shared hardware). With ServiceNow's unique multi-instance architecture providing the best of multi-tenancy and-single tenancy.
- Security and compliance — there is not a week where at least one serious vendor security breach is reported in the press; and how many go unreported? So security excellence is not optional. ServiceNow has circa 40 security engineers and uses third party security experts as needed. Security must be constantly challenged and tested.
- Availability — enterprise IT cloud is "bringing back the 9s." We have seen 1980s' dial-tone 99.999% availability drop to consumer cloud's 99.5% availability in the mid-1990s. But enterprise IT cloud now demands 99.99% availability. It requires continuous improvements in architecture and operational excellence; ServiceNow delivers on 99.99% availability through its advanced high availability infrastructure and operations.
- Meeting industry-specific needs — a one size cloud does NOT fit all. The enterprise IT cloud needs to meet the needs of data sovereignty (e.g. banking and public sector) with data center locations that meet regulations for data movement across borders. And seasonal industries (e.g. retail and accounting) need more flexibility and control over system upgrade timing.
- Extensibility — enterprise IT cloud needs to be configurable, extensible, and integrated. Gartner, a global research firm, reported on the importance of enterprise platform capabilities with 78% of surveyed organizations seeing PaaS as either a requirement or very important for SaaS (Source: Gartner — Survey Analysis: Buyers Tell Us About SaaS and Cloud Adoption Through 2014 (October 2012)). ServiceNow meets this need.
To get a copy of Arne's full presentation please see here.
Or if you want to hear more from ServiceNow customers, partners, employees, and senior leaders then Knowledge 14, the annual ServiceNow customer event, is for you. Where from April 27 - May 1 2014 circa 6000 IT service management (ITSM) and cloud professionals will descend upon San Francisco for a great learning and networking experience.
