The Reality of the Service Desk in Hybrid Clouds

Use of the hybrid cloud requires a process for managing the ongoing performance of public and private cloud services in connection with internal services. One fundamental issue in managing services is that when you do it well, the service management team is like the wizard behind the curtain in the Land of Oz. If your e-mail never goes down and your technical equipment never fails, you won’t go looking behind the curtain to understand why it works.

The reality is that services do fail and errors do occur — and when they do, customers (or service users) want questions answered and problems resolved.

For many businesses, the service desk is the first port of call when an incident or a problem occurs. A service desk provides a single point of contact for IT users and customers to report issues they have with the service. The service desk is generally responsible to receive information when an incident is reported, ensure that the problem is properly diagnosed and evaluated, and then make sure the problem is fixed quickly. However, in hybrid cloud environments, your service desk may find it challenging to integrate service information across the internal data center and public and private clouds.

How can your service desk provide an accurate and timely response to requests from internal users without controlling the management of your public cloud resources? When public cloud services are well managed, your cloud service providers can significantly ease the cloud management burden on your internal IT staff. However, imagine the lost productivity and revenue (and the all-around chaos) that might occur in the cloud if your cloud provider can’t manage service delivery and deal with problems effectively. Also, imagine how difficult it is for your service desk to respond to your internal customers without an effective system of communication with your cloud providers. Without insight into the environment of the cloud provider, your service desk cannot predict when a service interruption may occur and may not be able to provide the business user with any useful information regarding when service will be restored.

You simply cannot assume that your cloud providers will give you the support you need. You may have contracts with lots of different cloud providers and you need to do your homework. As we have said before, all cloud providers are not the same. Depending on the contract you have with your cloud providers, they may or may not offer the right level of information. Open source cloud offerings may not provide a way to contact a service desk.

As described in the previous section on the cloud service management ecosystem, you may want to enlist the service of a cloud broker to help with the management of services from multiple cloud providers.

Some service providers may provide different levels of support depending on the provisions of your contract. Basic support might mean a 12–48 hour response time via a web-based portal where you ask your question. It might also simply mean access to a web-based community. Cloud providers are beginning to compete on higher cost premium packages with more personalized and timely service. Some premium packages may provide you with an account manager who can route your trouble ticket to the top of the service queue. Your premium package may provide a rapid 15-minute response to the most critical problems.

Coordination between IT and cloud provider service desks

Your internal customers need to trust that IT services will be delivered as expected and fixed promptly when there are problems. You know your organization needs to monitor the entire environment based on service requirements of your business users.

So how can you best manage the coordination required between your enterprise IT and cloud provider service desks? You should establish policies and best practice guidelines for all internal users so they can easily funnel all service requests through your service desk (or your service broker’s service desk). It will only add confusion (and possibly go against service provider contract terms) if each user of a cloud service makes independent service calls or e-mails to the cloud provider. You can also set up a triage based on the severity of the problem. In many cases you may be able to resolve simple problems internally without involving the cloud provider service desk.

When you want your cloud providers to support a major set of services in your environment there are several important capabilities you want them to provide, which we describe in this section.

Incident and problem management

Incident and problem management services include recording, routing, and resolving an issue; notifying interested parties on the status of the issue; and reporting on the issue. The following issues may cause serious outages and are among the most important that need attention.

Configuration management: Someone made an error while changing a configuration.

Network: The network gets overloaded.

Database: A database table needs to be optimized.

System management: A server’s processors failed, and the failover didn’t work.

IT security: A denial-of-service attack is in progress.

Application: A program has a bug.

Change management

The service desk should support the management of change requests, including information about how system parts interact. Often, the provider will include some support for customization in the contract. This might consist of one-on-one interactions with someone on the cloud staff.

Knowledge base

If service desk personnel don’t have the right information to do their jobs, they won’t be able to respond and perform appropriately. Knowledge management ensures that people get the information they need to do their jobs correctly. Service management systems often link to a database for past incidents and how they were resolved; this database speeds the resolution of incidents.