How to Choose a SaaS-Based IT Service Management Solution Date:   Wednesday , November 03, 2010 The choice on how best to consume software — whether on-premises or through a Software as a Service (SaaS) model — is based on your specific requirements at different points in your business and organizational lifecycles. Each model presents benefits that take into consideration the IT skills available within your organization and your budget for capital versus operational expenses. When you look at each model, it is also important to consider the potential for growth in your IT infrastructure and the level of customization and integration required. The Right Approach Choosing a SaaS delivery model for IT service management can provide your IT organization with many benefits. Leaving the IT service management infrastructure to a SaaS vendor avoids the upfront costs of purchasing and implementing the software, the capital expense of buying hardware, and the costs associated with compliance and security best practices. However, even after having chosen to adopt a SaaS model, you still need to decide ‘how much’ IT service management you need. Do you need a tactically focused, slimmed-down helpdesk application focused on basic workflow for incident management and asset stores? Or do you need a more full-featured system that provides detailed information about the IT infrastructure and best-practice IT workflows? Choosing the right IT service management approach is critical because it will help determine not only your IT costs, but also your business agility for years to come. Here are the criteria that have helped IT organizations like yours choose the right level of a SaaS-based IT service management platform. Key Criteria The size of your user base, along with your staff size and associated skill levels, can provide important clues about the range and complexity of your environment. We have found that IT organizations generally employ one helpdesk professional for every 100 users, and that those organizations with a maximum of 35 helpdesk professionals are generally candidates for a smaller, slimmed-down offering. Firms with more than 35 helpdesk professionals, on the other hand, tend to have more demanding requirements that call for higher-end IT service management systems as well as a skilled staff to implement them effectively. Other considerations might be more important than size, however. One is the current and future complexity of your application environment and the IT infrastructure that supports it. If your applications — as well as the servers, storage, and networks that support them — are reasonably simple and static, you could consider a more basic solution to hold down cost and complexity. The greater the complexity the more you should consider a comprehensive solution. Another factor to consider is how the solution will help you deliver IT services more quickly and at lower cost. If you have a very complex environment, the automation and management provided by a comprehensive solution might actually reduce the cost and time required to provide such services, even though the solution may appear to be more expensive than a more basic alternative. If your environment is less complex, a basic solution may be a better way to get that agility and savings. A comprehensive IT service management solution provides more information and enables more processes. If managing ‘what you do’ is becoming as important, or more important, than ‘what you have’, you should also consider a comprehensive IT service management platform. Basic systems usually provide only an asset inventory application, rather than an asset management system that uses a configuration management database (CMDB) to catalog information about your IT assets. The CMDB found in comprehensive systems not only stores asset data, but also normalizes and shares it with an entire range of IT service management tools. An enterprise-scale CMDB improves the speed and accuracy of helpdesk services, while also supporting more mature, enterprise-wide change and release processes. In addition, an enterprise-level CMDB eases asset and software license management activities, ranging from providing software to users to retiring unneeded software. Integration The ability to integrate other systems — such as infrastructure discovery, event management, or business applications — into your IT service management platform is usually found only in more comprehensive solutions. While most basic systems ship with integration to authentication mechanisms, such as LDAP, you should consider a broader solution if you need integration with infrastructure discovery, event management, or such business applications as ERP or CRM systems. With broad integration needs comes the requirement for infrastructure discovery tools that enable tracking of IT components, such as servers, network switches, and storage arrays through their service lifecycles. By tracking the IT service components that provide critical business services, you are better able to make the decisions required to resolve service slowdowns or interruptions, or to meet industry, corporate, or legally mandated compliance and governance standards. Change Management and Service Level Management Comprehensive IT service management solutions tend to provide higher levels of support, as well as more mature processes around change management and service level management. You should give greater consideration to change management the more you are experiencing serious problems implementing changes or security updates within your normal maintenance windows. You should also make it a very high priority if you have experienced slowdowns or crashes because of changes made in error or in the wrong order, or if the problems are caused by ‘collisions’ among multiple releases. Moving to a broader IT service management solution with mature change management processes might also help you reduce costs and errors by grouping configuration changes or by changing the order in which they are done. Service level management capabilities found in comprehensive IT service management solutions may be worthwhile if your business requires interactions among multiple applications and IT infrastructure components, or if you need to provide different levels of service to various classes of users. Other considerations include whether you must meet specific SLAs for users in different business units or divisions, and whether the business measures IT on its ability to provide business services (such as decision support for a manufacturing system or policy underwriting) rather than just applications and network uptime. Release Management and Data Center Automation The more you need mature release management capabilities and data center automation, the more you should consider a comprehensive IT service management solution. You should give more consideration to release management to the extent that you have experienced problems implementing new application releases within your normal maintenance windows or have experienced application outages or slowdowns due to software that was released in error or released in the wrong order. The streamlined release management provided by a robust IT service management tool can help free your IT staff from routine work to develop new mission-critical applications or services. Data center automation may be a requirement if your internal IT group is having trouble matching the prices that cloud service providers are quoting for IT services. It may also be a requirement if your IT staff is being pulled away from strategic, business-critical projects to ‘keep the lights on’ or deal with operational emergencies. Finally, this may also be a requirement if the management is considering outsourcing part or all of your IT operation to save money. The On-Premises Option While there are many benefits to deploying IT service management through a SaaS model, there are other cases where on-premises deployment may be the best option. On-premises deployment is required, of course, if your organization must comply with government, industry, or corporate guidelines that forbid corporate data or systems being hosted outside the enterprise firewall. It may also be the best option when senior business or IT management staff are, for whatever reason, fundamentally opposed to moving critical systems to ‘the cloud’. On-premises deployment may be a better fit the more you need to customize the code (as opposed to just reconfiguring the system settings) or integrate it with locally hosted applications. You should consider on-premises deployment if you have significant concerns about the reliability or speed of the Internet access available to your enterprise. In summary, there is a variety of IT service management choices available to you. If you choose the SaaS delivery option, consider looking for an ITIL-based helpdesk that meets the needs of organizations with smaller or less complex requirements. An on-demand option, however, can provide a SaaS-based IT service management solution for organizations that need more extensive capabilities in such areas as incident, problem, and change management, as well as integration with other applications. Alternatively, if you choose to go on-premises, consider whether you need essential service desk capabilities, or a full-featured IT service management solution. As you consider your current and future requirements, look for a vendor that provides the flexibility to move your deployment between the cloud and on-premises as needed. This allows you to protect your investment, while also providing the flexibility to adapt as your business requirements change. The author is Vice President and General Manager, SaaS Business, BMC Software and Christopher Williams, Lead Service Support Solutions Manager, BMC Software