Deep understanding of SaaS

Software as a service (SaaS) is not only a delivery model in cloud computing, but also a service model that enterprise IT departments need to meet the management needs of IT services. In SaaS mode, IT organizations can prioritize people and infrastructure resources on high-priority activities and initiatives while ensuring the efficiency of IT service management solutions. These benefits can be achieved even if the IT department does not invest additional resources in System setup, maintenance management, and application upgrades.

The SaaS model can also provide benefits beyond the same benefits as traditional IT service management solutions, such as reducing capital expenditure, accelerating the start-up and running of IT service management programs, and simplifying upgrade methods. A typical SaaS model can use the Internet for remote hosting, delivery, and management services, as well as the processing and storage of shared resources through subscription service applications.

But before transitioning to SaaS mode, the IT department needs to understand the following: How will SaaS meet your requirements? What do you need to put in? Does this approach help you achieve more flexible transitions and transitions? This paper focuses on several key points to consider when transferring from traditional software delivery mode to SaaS mode.

Select built-in IT service management or outsource SaaS mode?

How do companies decide whether to implement an IT service management solution within a company or a subscription service? The answer depends on the type, level and cost of the enterprise it, the comparison of the capital budget and the operational costs, the likelihood of an enterprise IT infrastructure expansion, and the degree of customization and integration of the other components of the IT infrastructure and management scenarios required by enterprise workflows and processes.
IT departments that are suitable for SaaS-mode subscriptions to IT service management typically have the following requirements:

• Lack of time, budget, or staff to deploy the configuration Management database (CMDB) platform and consolidate multiple discovery and event management systems into IT service management solutions
• Need to reduce or avoid additional hardware and software capital expenditures
• Requires SAS 70 or ISO 27002 data security, but lacks specific implementation personnel or capabilities within the enterprise
• Multiple requirements for IT service management capabilities, or unpredictable growth requirements for IT service management

A clear choice of SaaS motivation

Decision makers must understand the main reason why they choose to SaaS because they may affect other relevant decisions of the enterprise. SaaS is a generic term that has different meanings for different people. To understand what SaaS means to you, you need to address the following issues in advance:

• Do you intend to transfer capital expenditure to operational expenditure?
• Is there a need to solve the problem of insufficient technical resources in the management system?
• Are most of your costs for purchasing and maintaining hardware and software, or for hiring people to operate the help desk and other key IT service management processes?
• Is there a strong preference for preset or managed hardware and software (including data)?
• Is software upgrades and accelerated software running the biggest challenge?

It is clear that the motivation for choosing the SaaS model is that the enterprise can make the best decision. After the SaaS mode is adopted in IT service management, the enterprise can reduce the software cost and the corresponding running cost. However, this is only one aspect of cost savings. "According to Gartner's IT critical assessment data, it desks account for approximately 4% of the IT budget," Gartner said in its "Magic Quadrant for It desks" released on October 16, 2009. Because the cost of the IT desk 86% is related to people, this means that 3.88% of the IT budget is used to pay the IT desk staff. Another 14% of it helpdesk costs are primarily used to run IT services and supported hardware and software. ”

So, having a holistic view of the overall cost, we find that the most of the IT budget is related to staff costs. If a solution can not only reduce the cost of the software itself, but also greatly improve the productivity of people, then the enterprise will have a higher return on investment.

Identify your needs for flexible service patterns

You need to consider not only the flexibility and business protection that SaaS brings, but also the cost of migrating from an enterprise's existing model to SaaS scenarios, especially employee retraining and data migration costs. Therefore, you need to consider the flexibility of transition between different service delivery modes-from presets to hosting, from permanent licensing to short-term licensing, from in-house staffing to outsourced staffing. All of these need to find a solution that can achieve these demands through a single tool. The goal is that within the next 3-5 years, you can migrate between different service delivery models based on your business needs without having to give up your original investment every time.

Finding solutions across all service delivery patterns

Ideally, the enterprise should be able to choose between three service delivery modes (preset software permanent license, escrow lease, full outsourcing) according to the business needs, and in the migration between these three, still can maintain the consistent data pattern, thus guaranteeing data security and its reusable. Keeping the process consistent in three modes is critical, and companies need to have some investment protection. For example, suppose you choose a three-year SaaS leasing model and make an upfront payment, so even if the contract is halfway through, you should be free to switch back to the traditional model, and the investment will not be affected, or you may choose to use some of the money that has been paid but not used for future operational expenses. Only in this way can an enterprise choose to switch freely between three modes at different points in time, without having to start from scratch or suffer investment losses such as process development, training, and abandonment of unused contract amounts after each conversion.
Why do IT departments need to migrate from one mode to another? This depends on the change in the business environment in which it resides. For example, IT departments may be under great pressure to reduce capital expenditure and must use existing funds for operating expenses. At this point, the IT department may choose to migrate to SaaS mode to avoid hardware, software, or capital expenditure investments. However, in the next two or three years, the business environment may be changed to new requirements for service patterns.

When major business adjustments such as acquisitions or mergers occur, companies often decide to outsource, and a year later decide to turn everything into internal processing. Mergers and acquisitions are common in today's business environment, and companies need flexibility to respond to new corporate governance rules. If you choose SaaS as an on demand payment service, and you want to be free to switch back to the previous pattern, you must ensure that your service provider has the ability to provide different pattern choices based on your specific business situation changes.

What are the main concerns when IT service management chooses the SaaS delivery model?

SaaS IT service management solutions should be able to easily and economically integrate with out-of-the-way tools to proactively and automatically find solutions to problems that disrupt critical services. For example, SaaS IT service management solutions should be able to discover it assets, track asset changes, and share data with a large number of monitoring and management applications. In addition, the SaaS IT service management solution should take full advantage of the current IT asset information stored in the CMDB. This single and centralized IT infrastructure accurate information source helps to avoid the contradictions and confusion caused by multiple it asset information sources.

It is also important that solutions delivered through SaaS should be able to share data with various applications to authorize, execute, and monitor changes to IT infrastructure. In addition, such scenarios should provide a pre-configured, out-of-the-go, and ITIL compliance capability that includes events, issues, changes, publications, assets, service requests, service levels, and knowledge management processes. Such solutions should also provide flexible integration options, including network services that meet the needs of high-volume data processing.

Understand how security-related issues should be addressed

Be sure to focus on security issues in the SaaS model and determine different levels of security for different types of data. A key in security priorities is to ensure that data centers that store customer data are authenticated by SAS Type II to meet key requirements for physical security, restricted area control, human resources management, data security, and confidentiality, as defined in ISO 27002. Such data should be stored in separate physical or virtual servers, with intrusion detection and prevention systems, passwords and encryption using the IP SEC or the lowest AES 256-bit encryption protection. The service provider should provide backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans to ensure the availability of the service system.

Summary
SaaS is a viable option for IT service management, allowing the enterprise to have one more choice in both delivery and business models. If it fits your target needs, then you can choose the SaaS delivery model. It's important to note that before you buy a software delivery model for your business, you need to analyze what you want to solve. SaaS is just one option and don't overlook other alternatives. What you need to do is to first dig out what the core value drive is, so that you can determine whether you are buying SaaS or permanently licensed preset products.

If you lack the technical capability to deploy within your company, your company policy requires you to deploy management solutions within your department. You can consider outsourcing system management business, so that outsourcing service providers in the Enterprise internal server maintenance management, so that can save the enterprise's own human resources. In addition, do not only value cost savings, hardware and software investment return ratio, or related management costs. While these are important, if you choose the right solution, you can significantly improve the efficiency of your help desk staff, improve your work, and optimize your core business processes, which will help your organization achieve more important business value.

Last thought

Solutions delivered through SaaS should provide integrated asset management, change management, help desk management, incident and problem management, self-service that includes asset configuration management for inventory tracking, and should be able to consolidate the CMDB. IT services management through SaaS, IT organizations can have a single, centralized, shared data model, based on the CMDB from a unified service perspective to manage all the functions and processes, the application of a single, unified architecture, no need to manage point-to-point multiple interfaces.

IT service management helps to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the enterprise, while the methods used to deploy and maintain the solution can also have a significant impact on the profitability and it performance of the enterprise. If the IT department is understaffed and too small to support the IT service management infrastructure economically and effectively, consider adopting the SaaS delivery model. SaaS is a good choice if you don't have the necessary skills within your organization and want to improve it's speed. The SaaS model also helps the IT department focus on addressing core issues. When selecting a service solution vendor, the enterprise should select a vendor to embed best practices in the scenario from the initial phase, so that the standardized ITIL based scenario settings can be deployed. If an enterprise needs a large customization program to get the basic capabilities it needs, then don't choose the SaaS solution. The business requirements of an enterprise change over time, so it is important to select a vendor that enables the enterprise to transfer its service delivery model in a simple, rapid and cost-effective manner. BMC Software offers two SaaS delivery modes: BMC on-demand custom remedy IT service Management suite and BMC help desk express running on force.com platform.

Author Introduction

Paul Avinon (Paul avenant) is a senior vice president of product and strategy for the BMC Software company's Enterprise Services management, which is responsible for product strategy and research and development of all solutions for business Services Management (BSM), BMC Atrium, service automation, service support, and service assurance. Under his leadership, BMC Atrium is ahead of the industry with its uniquely unified BSM architecture. Mr. Paul Avinon has over 20 years of experience in the field of network, systems and services management, and has served in various fields such as research and development, consulting and management.