Cloud Provisioning with ServiceNow: Consolidation, Consumerization, Automation and Orchestration

[MichaelDortch]

Got cloud computing? Then you've probably got virtual machines (VMs) to provision and manage. Which means you've probably got problems.

One problem: VM sprawl. Uncontrolled growth of VMs across your environment. It's like server sprawl, only faster, and even more difficult to tame.

Another problem: opacity. The opposite of visibility. While your users are spinning up VMs at will, you have little to no visibility into what they're doing, or how it's affecting the overall state of your cloud operations infrastructure.

To the rescue: ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning. A new application, available now, that leverages multiple ServiceNow features to solve both of these problems, consistently and effectively.

Users can use Service Catalog to request cloud resources Amazon EC2 or VMware VMs. Cloud Provisioning then uses ServiceNow Orchestration to automate provisioning of those resources, and ServiceNow Change Management to define and enforce relevant change policies.

The results? You get to manage every VM and cloud instance from request through provisioning to retirement, to eliminate VM sprawl. And you get complete visibility into all of your cloud operations, through a single, consolidated portal view of all assets, requests, and exceptions.

The coolest thing, though, is how ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning reflects and amplifies the core benefits of ServiceNow for IT service management and automation. The ServiceNow Service Automation suite delivers consolidation, consumer-like self-service, and automation. And ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning consolidates and automates lifecycle management of cloud resources, while making them as easy to request as anything else in a ServiceNow Service Catalog.

And the benefits are equally aligned and profound. ServiceNow lets you say "yes" more often and with more confidence to almost any request for IT resources or services. And ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning lets you say "yes" more often and with more confidence to requests for public and private cloud resources. Both of which are giant leaps forward in your continuing efforts to transform your IT department from "the department of no" to "the department of now." As in "how can we help you and the business more, now?"

With ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning, you can say, to paraphrase Jay-Z (who was quoting Ice-T), "I got 99 problems, but the cloud ain't one." Which can't be a bad thing to be able to say. So if you've got cloud computing, you need to check out ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning. (You might start by reading Dan Turchin's fine post, "ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning: It Isn't About Cloud."