ITAM and Cloud/IaaS

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is?a type of cloud computing service that typically offers on-demand and highly scalable access over the Internet to virtualized IT assets owned and hosted by the service provider in multi-tenancy. Such IT assets typically include virtual servers, storage, networking, optional software components, and others. Leading commercial IaaS offerings include Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and others.

IT assets provided over IaaS meet the definition of an IT Asset in ISO/IEC 19770-1, follow a lifecycle comparable to traditional on-prem IT assets, and similarly require effective management. The many business advantages of IaaS have resulted in its broad adoption, where many organizations consume IaaS from more than one provider. IaaS is typically a critical part of the organization’s overall hybrid digital infrastructure and is often used to run business-critical workloads.

With its many advantages, however, the nature of IaaS also presents unique challenges to effective IT Asset Management, including the following (partial list):

• Rapid change – Thousands of assets may be provisioned, de-provisioned or their configuration changed within seconds, often through automation without human touch. Asset lifespan may be limited to hours and even minutes. This creates several challenges for ITAM, including maintaining completeness, accuracy, and timeliness of coverage, relevance of reporting, effectiveness of optimization efforts, and others;
• Decentralization – Engineering teams, and sometimes automation created by engineering, often have full end-to-end control over asset consumption and, consequently, spend. Furthermore, governance and control, such as timely SAM tool agent deployment on new cloud assets, while possible to automate within IaaS, may also be more difficult to enforce centrally;
• Difficulty understanding pricing, billing, and business value – monthly IaaS bills may reach hundreds of millions of lines. Pricing, options, and features are complex and change constantly. As a result, it is difficult to analyze cost components and understand cost fluctuations. A cost increase may be the simple result of an increased workload, or it may be due to lack of optimization;
• Susceptibility to waste – assets may be over-provisioned relative to their peak utilization, or kept turned on when not needed. This may result in waste with respect to both the cloud service itself and third-party software deployed on the cloud service. Discounts for committed workloads may not be utilized. With both workloads and pricing changing constantly, it may be more difficult to ensure that waste is minimized;
• Bring Your Own License (BYOL) – traditional on-prem licenses may have different licensing metrics and requirements when used in IaaS, varying by publisher;
• Marketplace – third-party software may be purchased on a subscription basis from the cloud provider acting as a reseller, requiring no direct relationship with the software publisher. While Marketplace may otherwise be a highly effective model for end-user organizations, it may also represent increased cost over time as compared to BYOL/perpetual licenses. In addition, Marketplace software may be intermingled with BYOL for the same software publisher or even the same product(s), creating additional challenges in software license reconciliation; and
• New technologies – such as virtual containers (for example, Kubernetes), serverless, and others, some of which have significant licensing implications, are rapidly emerging within IaaS requiring specific attention by ITAM practitioners.

Addressing the unique ITAM challenges in IaaS involves several considerations, including the following:

• Scope of ITAM –ITAM needs to address the entire hybrid infrastructure scope, which includes on-prem, SaaS, IaaS, BYOD, BYOL, and others.?ITAM simply cannot ignore any part of the hybrid infrastructure (IaaS or otherwise) if it wishes to remain relevant to the business in the long run;
• Real-time & agile ITAM – ITAM needs to become more real-time and agile to align with the dynamic nature of IaaS specifically, and the overall pace of change within the hybrid digital infrastructure in general. The only way to achieve this may be with smart automation;
• Collaboration & information – Given the nature of IaaS, and the growing proportion of IaaS as part of the organization’s IT Assets, ITAM must collaborate closely with DevOps, engineering teams, Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), and other functions that control IaaS. ITAM should elevate its reporting maturity across all IT Assets, including the timeliness, depth, breadth, quality, and business relevance of information reported, to enable informed decision making and to drive continuous optimization; and
• Cloud Financial Management – ITAM should develop and maintain an ongoing capability for cloud financial management which includes tracking and optimizing IaaS costs. FinOps is one common methodology for accomplishing this. FinOps includes 3 main iterative phases: Inform (tagging of IaaS assets and reporting), Optimize (optimizing both pricing and consumption of IaaS), and Operate (process and automation). Unfortunately, even where adopted, FinOps is typically found to be operating in a silo, managing the cost of the cloud provider itself (e.g. AWS or Azure), ignoring third-party software running on IaaS and other IaaS costs, and ignoring the entire non-IaaS part of the organization's infrastructure. Often, little or no collaboration exists between FinOps and ITAM. Instead, an ITAM best practice is to take a holistic view of the hybrid digital infrastructure, where IaaS providers are no more and no less than additional technology providers in need of spend optimization. ITAM and FinOps should be closely aligned and, in more mature organizations – ideally combined.

In conclusion, IaaS presents unique challenges for ITAM, but also great opportunities to demonstrate ITAM’s value. ITAM functions cannot ignore IaaS if they wish to remain relevant to the business in the long term.