It is necessary to understand the cloud service lifecycle to understand the impact and changes of cloud computing on IT service management in a typical organization.
Service principles are important in order to provide measurable value to business objectives and outcomes that are underlined in ITIL service management. Service strategy is at the core of the cloud service life cycle. It is the fundamental phase that is used to define service principles.
Service design, transition, and operation are the revolving life-cycle stages, while the continual service improvement stage is used to anchor these revolving life-cycle stages.
Phases of the cloud service lifecycle :
Service design : It provides assistance in design and development of cloud services.
Service strategy : It is the phase in which the business strategies, policies, and objectives are defined and an understanding about the constraints, requirements, and business values is developed.
Service transition : This is when the service design defined in the design phase is transitioned into production with the chosen service provider.
Service operation : The phase that provides direction on how to achieve success and efficiency in delivering and supporting services. The primary goal of this phase is to ensure value to the customer and the service provider by delivering and managing quality services at the agreed upon levels, as well as execution of all ongoing activities required to deliver and support services. . This is when the business will achieve its day-to-day strategic objectives.
Continuous service improvement : It maintains and improves the value of cloud service for meeting the business needs.
Service Design phase
The service design provides assistance in design and development of cloud services. It also supports in the conversion of strategic objectives into a portfolio of services and service assets. It includes changes and improvements that are essential to increasing and maintaining the value to the customer over the entire life cycle. The following items are considered, at a minimum, taking input from the service strategy phase during the service design phase:
Service Catalogue Management
Orchestration
Security Design
Network configuration and change management (NCCM)
Service-level agreements (SLA)
Billing and chargeback
Service Strategy phase
Service strategy is the phase in which the business strategies, policies, and objectives are defined and an understanding about the constraints, requirements, and business values is developed.
The following items are considered at a minimum to be successful in cloud services during the service strategy phase:
1. Cloud architecture assessment : It analyzes the current architecture and technology choices in order to determine the most suitable cloud strategy, architecture, and operations management. 2. Operations (people, processes, products, and partners (4Ps)) : The operations such as people, processes, products, and partners are required to build a structure for the domain within the IT organization. 3. Demand Management : It evaluates the demand for service capacity and controls the capacity that is necessary with the expected flexibility.
Financial management or value creation (ROI):
It includes the following steps:
Service valuation
Service investment analysis
Business impact analysis
4. Performing service value creation, service investment analysis, and service business impact analysis are considered key steps before embarking on cloud services.
5. Risk management : It handles the main areas of risk in the cloud, including security threats, failure of equipment, and the inability to deliver services to customers.
Demand Management
Service management is faced with the task of discovering a continual balance between utilization and delivery of services.
Demand management is used to calculate the demands for the service capacity in good times and thus, it controls the necessary capacity with the anticipated flexibility.
Demand management is a significant process inside the service strategy lifecycle stage.
The lack of demand management can become a hazard for the service provider as it cannot timely regulate the service demand.
