While a new era of artificial intelligence (AI) may currently dominate tech headlines, cloud computing remains a hot and pervasive topic to this day. As you consider evolving your business more to the cloud, whether for application or infrastructure deployment, it is more important than ever to understand the differences and advantages of the various cloud services.

Although as-a-service types continue to grow, there are usually three core models of cloud service to consider and compare:

• Software as a service (SaaS)
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)

For each of these, we’ll look at the concept, benefits, and variances. We’ll also help you understand the key differences among SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, so you can choose an approach that’s right for your organization.

(More interested in cloud setup? Learn more about public, private, and hybrid cloud differences.)

Key differences

Common examples of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS

SaaS: Software as a service

Software as a service (SaaS), also known as cloud application services, represents the most commonly utilized option for businesses in the cloud market. SaaS leverages the internet to deliver applications, which are managed by a third-party vendor, to its users. A majority of SaaS applications run directly through your web browser, which means they do not require any downloads or installations on the client side.

SaaS delivery

Due to its web-delivery model, SaaS eliminates the need to have IT staff download and install applications on each individual computer. With SaaS, vendors manage all potential technical issues, such as data, middleware, servers, and storage, resulting in streamlined maintenance and support for the business customer.

SaaS advantages

SaaS provides numerous advantages to employees and companies by greatly reducing the time and money spent on tedious tasks, such as installing, managing, and upgrading software. This frees up time for technical staff to spend on bustiness-critical issues within the organization.

SaaS characteristics

There are a few ways to help you determine when SaaS is being utilized:

• Managed from a central location
• Hosted on a remote server
• Accessible over the internet
• Users not responsible for hardware or software updates

When to use SaaS

SaaS may be the most beneficial option in several situations, including:

• Startups or small companies that need to launch e-commerce quickly and don’t have time for server issues or complex on-premises software
• Short-term projects that require quick, easy, and affordable collaboration
• Applications that aren’t needed too often, such as tax software
• Applications that need both web and mobile access

SaaS limitations and concerns

• Interoperability. Integration with existing apps and services can be a major concern if the SaaS application is not designed to follow open standards for integration. In this case, organizations may need to design their own integration systems or reduce dependencies with SaaS services, which may not always be possible.
• Vendor lock-in. Vendors may make it easy to join a service and difficult to get out of it. For instance, the data may not be portable—technically or cost-effectively—across SaaS applications from other vendors without incurring significant cost or in-house engineering rework. Not every vendor follows standard APIs, protocols, and tools, yet the features could be necessary for certain business tasks.
• Lack of integration support. Many organizations require deep integrations with on-premises applications, data, and services. The SaaS vendor may offer limited support in this regard, forcing organizations to invest internal resources in designing and managing integrations. The complexity of integrations can further limit how the SaaS app or other dependent services can be used.
• Data security. Large volumes of data may have to be exchanged with the backend data centers of SaaS applications in order to perform the necessary software functionality. Transferring sensitive business information to public, cloud-based SaaS services may result in compromised security and compliance, in addition to incurring significant cost for migrating large data workloads.
• Customization. SaaS applications offer minimal customization capabilities. Since a one-size-fits-all solution does not exist, users may be limited to specific functionality, performance, and integrations as offered by the vendor. In contrast, on-premises solutions that come with several software development kits (SDKs) offer a high degree of customization options.
• Lack of control. SaaS solutions involve handing control over to the third-party service provider. These controls are not only limited to the software—in terms of the version, updates, or appearance—but, also to the data and governance. Customers may, therefore, need to redefine their data security and governance models to fit the features and functionality of the SaaS offering.
• Feature limitations. Since SaaS applications often come in a standardized form, the choice of features may be a compromising tradeoff against security, cost, performance, or other organizational policies. Furthermore, vendor lock-in, cost, or security concerns may mean it’s not viable to switch vendors or services to serve new feature requirements in the future.
• Performance and downtime. Because the vendor controls and manages the SaaS service, your customers now depend on vendors to maintain the service’s security and performance. Planned and unplanned maintenance, cyberattacks, or network issues may impact the performance of the SaaS application despite adequate service level agreement (SLA) protections in place.

Examples of SaaS

Popular examples of SaaS include:

• Google Workspace (formerly GSuite)
• Dropbox
• Salesforce
• Cisco WebEx
• SAP Concur
• GoToMeeting

Planning to migrate enterprise IT functions to the cloud? Check out the BMC Helix Platform. › 

PaaS: Platform as a service

Cloud platform services, also known as platform as a service (PaaS), provide cloud components to certain software while being used mainly for applications. PaaS delivers a framework that developers can build upon and use to create customized applications. All servers, storage, and networking can be managed by the enterprise or a third-party provider while the developers can maintain management of the applications.

PaaS delivery

The delivery model of PaaS is similar to SaaS, except instead of delivering the software over the internet, PaaS provides a platform for software creation. This platform is delivered via the web, giving developers the freedom to concentrate on building the software without having to worry about operating systems, software updates, storage, or infrastructure.

PaaS allows businesses to design and create applications and integrate special software components into the PaaS. These applications, sometimes called middleware, are scalable and highly available as they take on certain cloud characteristics.

PaaS advantages

No matter the size of your company, using PaaS offers numerous advantages, including:

• Simple, cost-effective development and deployment of applications
• Scalability
• Highly available
• Application customization without software maintenance
• Significant reduction in the amount of coding needed
• Automation of business policy
• Easy migration to the hybrid model

PaaS characteristics

PaaS has many characteristics that define it as a cloud service, including:

• Builds on virtualization technology, so resources can easily be scaled up or down as your business changes
• Provides a variety of services to assist with the development, testing, and deployment of apps
• Accessibility to many users via the same development application
• Integration with web services and databases

When to use PaaS

Using PaaS is beneficial, sometimes even necessary, in several situations. For example, PaaS can streamline workflows when multiple developers are working on the same development project. If other vendors must be included, PaaS can provide great speed and flexibility to the entire process. PaaS is particularly beneficial if you need to create customized applications. This cloud service also can greatly reduce costs and simplify some of the challenges that arise if you are rapidly developing or deploying an application.

PaaS limitations and concerns

• Data security. Organizations can run their own apps and services using PaaS solutions, but the data residing in third-party, vendor-controlled cloud servers poses security risks and concerns. Your security options could be limited as customers may be unable to deploy services with specific hosting policies.
• Integrations. The complexity of connecting the data stored within an onsite data center or off-premises cloud is increased, which may affect which applications and services can be adopted with the PaaS offering. Integration with existing services and infrastructure may be a challenge for legacy IT systems with components that were not built for the cloud.
• Vendor lock-in. Business and technical requirements that drive decisions for a specific PaaS solution may not apply in the future. If the vendor has not provisioned convenient migration policies, switching to alternative PaaS options may not be possible without affecting the business.
• Customization of legacy systems. PaaS may not be a plug-and-play solution for existing legacy applications and services. Instead, several customizations and configuration changes may be necessary for legacy systems to work with the PaaS service. The resulting customization can result in a complex IT system that may limit the value of the PaaS investment altogether.
• Runtime issues. In addition to limitations associated with specific applications and services, PaaS solutions may not be optimized for the language and frameworks of your choice. Specific framework versions may not be available or perform optimally with the PaaS service, and customers may not be able to develop custom dependencies with the platform.
• Operational limitation. Customized cloud operations with automated management workflows may not apply to PaaS solutions, as the platform tends to limit operational capabilities for end users. Although this is intended to reduce the operational burden on end users, the loss of operational control may affect how PaaS solutions are managed, provisioned, and operated.

Examples of PaaS

Popular examples of PaaS include:

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk
• Windows Azure
• Heroku
• Force.com
• Google App Engine
• OpenShift

Take the leap to the next level of IT Service Management with BMC Helix ITSM. › 

IaaS: Infrastructure as a service

Cloud infrastructure services, known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), are made of highly scalable and automated compute resources. IaaS is fully self-service for accessing and monitoring computers, networking, storage, and other services. IaaS allows businesses to purchase resources on demand and as needed instead of having to buy hardware outright.

IaaS delivery

IaaS delivers cloud computing infrastructure, including servers, networks, operating systems, and storage, through virtualization technology. These cloud servers are typically provided to the organization through a dashboard or API, giving IaaS clients complete control over the entire infrastructure. IaaS provides the same technologies and capabilities as a traditional data center without having to physically maintain or manage all of it. IaaS clients can still access their servers and storage directly, but it is all outsourced through a “virtual data center” in the cloud.

As opposed to SaaS or PaaS, IaaS clients are responsible for managing aspects such as applications, runtime, operating systems, middleware, and data. However, IaaS providers manage the servers, hard drives, networking, virtualization, and storage. Some providers also offer more services beyond the virtualization layer, such as databases or message queuing.

IaaS advantages

IaaS offers many advantages, including:

• The most flexible cloud computing model
• Easy automated deployment of storage, networking, servers, and processing power
• Consumption-based hardware purchasing
• Complete client control of their infrastructure
• Resource purchasing as needed
• High scalability

IaaS characteristics

Characteristics that define IaaS include:

• Resources available as a service
• Variable, consumption-based costs
• Highly scalable services
• Multi-user hardware access
• Organizational control of the infrastructure
• Dynamic flexibility

When to use IaaS

Just as with SaaS and PaaS, there are specific situations when IaaS is most advantageous.

• Startups and small companies may prefer IaaS to avoid spending time and money on purchasing and creating hardware and software.
• Larger companies may prefer to retain complete control over their applications and infrastructure, but they want to purchase only what they actually consume or need.
• Companies experiencing rapid growth like the scalability of IaaS, and they can change out specific hardware and software easily as their needs evolve.

Anytime you are unsure of a new application’s demands, IaaS offers plenty of flexibility and scalability.

IaaS limitations and concerns

Limitations associated with SaaS and PaaS models—such as data security, cost overruns, vendor lock-in and customization issues—also apply to the IaaS model. Particular limitations of IaaS include:

• Security. While the customer is in control of the applications, data, middleware, and the operating system platform, security threats can still be sourced from the host or other virtual machines (VMs). Insider threat or system vulnerabilities may expose data communication between the host infrastructure and VMs to unauthorized entities.
• Legacy systems operating in the cloud. While customers can run legacy applications in the cloud, the infrastructure may not be designed to deliver specific controls to secure them. Minor enhancements to legacy applications may be required before migrating them to the cloud, possibly leading to new security issues unless adequately tested for security and performance in the IaaS systems.
• Internal resources and training. Additional resources and training may be required for the workforce to learn how to effectively manage the infrastructure. Customers will be responsible for data security, backup, and business continuity. Due to inadequate control of the infrastructure, however, monitoring and management of the resources may be difficult without availability of adequate in-house training and resources.
• Multi-tenant security. Since the hardware resources are dynamically allocated across users as needed, the vendor is required to ensure that other customers cannot access data left on storage assets by previous customers. Similarly, customers must rely on the vendor to ensure that VMs are adequately isolated within the multi-tenant cloud architecture.

Examples of IaaS

Popular examples of IaaS include:

• DigitalOcean
• Linode
• Rackspace
• AWS
• Cisco Metacloud
• Microsoft Azure
• GCE

SaaS vs. PaaS vs. IaaS

Each cloud model offers specific features and functionalities, and it is crucial for your organization to understand the differences. Whether you need cloud-based software for storage options, a smooth platform that allows you to create customized applications, or complete control over your entire infrastructure without having to physically maintain it, there is a cloud service for you.

No matter which option you choose, migrating to the cloud is the future of business and technology.

XaaS: Everything as a service

One term you’re likely seeing more frequently in the world is XaaS, short for everything as a service. XaaS refers to the highly-individualized, responsive, data-driven products and offerings that are fully controlled by customers—and the data they provide via everyday Internet of Things (IoT)-powered sources like cell phones and thermostats.

By using that data generated over the cloud, businesses can innovate faster, deepen their customer relationships, and sustain the sale beyond the initial product purchase. XaaS is a critical enabler of the Autonomous Digital Enterprise.

Related reading

• BMC Blogs: Cloud
• Cloud Infrastructure: A Brief Introduction
• Hybrid Cloud Security: Challenges and Best Practices
• Data Center Tiers: What Are They and Why Are They Important?

Other “as a service” offerings:

• AI as a service
• Database as a service
• Business Process Management as a service (BPMaaS)
• Functions as a service
• Testing as a service

Defending the Whole, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS from Mark Nunnikhoven

Original reference images:
 

In the ever-evolving landscape of IT technology, amid the swift migration to cloud and containerized environments, organizations are striving to harness the benefits of scalability and flexibility while confronting the complexities of resource management and optimization, risks to service assurance, and cost containment. The solution lies in finding the delicate balance between ensuring impeccable service delivery and maximizing resource efficiency.

Cloud migration has ushered in a new era of possibilities, enabling organizations to transcend the limitations of traditional infrastructure. Despite these boundless opportunities, IT teams find themselves caught between the business imperatives of maintaining optimal service levels and making smart financial choices. This dynamic requires the orchestration of resources spanning diverse landscapes from hybrid configurations to fully cloud-based ecosystems and a holistic strategy that marries operational excellence with financial sensibility. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization does just that, orchestrating resources, services, and costs to ensure flawless, efficient, and cost-effective performance.

Navigating complexity

The shift to the cloud promises numerous benefits, from improved service levels to scalability, right-sizing, and cost savings. However, the journey isn’t without its share of challenges. Cloud adoption often introduces complexities tied to resource allocation, management across hybrid environments, and the ability to align resource provisioning with actual service demands, which leaves IT professionals ask questions such as:

• How can we ensure optimal service performance and availability in the cloud without incurring excessive costs through overprovisioning?
• How can we efficiently allocate resources across diverse deployment models, now and in the future?
• What strategies can we employ to predict future resource needs and ensure our cloud services are equipped to handle evolving business demands?

To address these challenges, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization goes beyond standard resource management, providing an integrated dashboard and a real-time, single pane of glass for all your business services. The solution’s whole-world view not only helps you optimize current resource allocation but also uses “what-if” simulation capabilities to proactively anticipate future resource needs. Leveraging data-driven insights derived from historical trends, consumption patterns, and projected growth, it ensures that your cloud resources are precisely aligned with upcoming requirements.

Addressing risk with service assurance and optimization

Instead of relying on traditional resource allocation methods, BMC Helix Continuous Optimization ensures that the allocation of resources is tailored to match the real-time demands of various services, delivering optimal performance levels and eliminating unnecessary wastage, which is crucial for efficient resource management in cloud environments.

Controlling costs with cloud-powered insights

Amid the dynamic and often unpredictable nature of cloud resource consumption, it’s essential to bridge the gap between resource allocation and service excellence to better control costs. BMC Helix Continuous Optimization comprehensively monitors and intricately analyzes trends in cloud resource consumption, drawing correlations with essential business KPIs to generate insights that are actionable.

The solution leverages that wealth of data alongside historical analysis and predictive modeling to understand how resource consumption patterns align with critical business key performance indicators (KPIs). From there, it’s able to make informed recommendations for allocation and rightsizing that mitigate the risk of overprovisioning while addressing wastage and surplus expenditures—and controlling costs.

Forecasting with confidence

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization’s forecasting capabilities empower organizations to proactively anticipate future resource requirements and allocate cloud resources well ahead of actual demand. The result is a seamless cloud operational landscape that remains resilient even in the face of change, ensuring uninterrupted services and consistent performance.

Orchestrating cloud excellence

BMC Helix Continuous Optimization offers a comprehensive approach that continuously monitors your business services’ resource utilization by analyzing trends, modeling demand, and correlating business KPIs to help manage complexity by right-sizing resources, managing risk, and meeting service levels without overspending.

Learn how BMC Helix Continuous Optimization can help you manage your cloud resources efficiently and deliver essential visibility and forecasting capabilities to stay ahead in the dynamic cloud landscape at bmc.com/optimize.

Try our self-guided demo, where you’ll discover the tools that enable better resource planning for today and tomorrow. Compare costs and resource requirements with our free Cloud Simulator tool.

Experience some of the forecasting capabilities of BMC Helix Continuous Optimization with the free Forecasting as a Service Tool (FaaST!).

Keeping up with the increasingly digital-first world means that modernizing your infrastructure has now accelerated from being a nice-to-have business requirement to a must-have. Moving to a private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud environment is part of that journey, and for many enterprise organizations, that means turning to a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host your always-on, on-demand, software-as-as-solution (SaaS) applications.

The robust, integrated BMC Helix SaaS family of services and solutions for migration planning, cost efficiency, monitoring and observability, and application workflow orchestration is now available on the AWS Cloud to help you optimize and manage your AWS cloud investment and enable a data-driven business. Even better, BMC Helix is Impact Level 4, Impact Level 5 (IL-4/IL-5) and FedRAMP Moderate certified to support the enhanced requirements of public sector and commercial enterprises.

Why BMC Helix on AWS Marketplace?

Bringing together the unparalleled capabilities of the BMC Helix SaaS solutions with the scalability and reliability of AWS Marketplace, this dynamic duo can help you maximize your investments and modernize your business processes. Say goodbye to operational complexity and hello to streamlined workflows that empower you to focus on what truly matters: innovation and growth.

Key features and benefits:

1. Seamless integration: BMC Helix SaaS solutions seamlessly integrate with your existing AWS infrastructure, ensuring hassle-free deployment and onboarding.
2. Unmatched scalability: With AWS Marketplace’s elastic scalability and BMC Helix’s SaaS agile solutions, your business can effortlessly adapt to changing demands.
3. Enhanced performance: Harnessing the power of AWS’s global network of data centers, BMC Helix SaaS solutions deliver optimized performance and reliability.
4. Advanced security: Get world-class protection for your business-critical data from BMC and AWS.

BMC Helix SaaS enables business modernization with solutions for:

Migration planning and cost efficiency: Plan, configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your AWS infrastructure to ensure optimal performance and cost efficiency with BMC Helix Enterprise Service Management, a cloud-native SaaS solution designed to elevate user experiences across lines of business through intelligent automation, unified workflows, and rapid customization, and BMC Helix Continuous Optimization, which uses intelligence and predictive analytics to manage and optimize IT resources and applications including those based on Pods, Kubernetes, microservices, containers, and multi-cloud services.

Monitoring and observability: Proactively improve the performance and availability of AWS services across public, private, or hybrid AWS environments with BMC Helix Operations Management for AIOps, which tackles challenging hybrid-cloud environments and uses data from third-party solutions to rationalize topologies and help you find root cause and fix the problem fast.

Dynamic service modeling: Discover and model your cloud services running in AWS, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments with BMC Helix Discovery, the market-leading IT asset discovery and dependency mapping that provides the deepest, most complete, real-time view of your IT estate using visual representation of business services for greater context.

Application workflow orchestration: Orchestrate complex application workflows and data pipelines across your AWS environments and beyond with BMC Helix Control-M, which simplifies application and data workflow orchestration, making it easy to build, define, schedule, manage, and monitor production workflows while ensuring visibility and reliability and improving SLAs.

Get started today

Don’t miss out on this remarkable opportunity to optimize, innovate, and elevate your business processes. Explore the synergy of BMC Helix SaaS solutions and AWS Marketplace now. Visit our dedicated BMC and AWS web page here and our AWS Marketplace hub here.

Are you an existing BMC customer considering a move to BMC Helix SaaS? Or a prospective customer deciding between an on-premises or SaaS deployment and need some guidance? Then this blog may help you decide which delivery model best suits you and your organization.

Let me begin by outlining very simply what the SaaS value proposition is by categorizing the two main benefits: the operational efficiency of not needing to run the BMC Helix application day-to-day and gaining faster access to BMC’s rapid rate of innovation. From my experience, customers will often place too much emphasis on the first point and neglect to consider the much greater benefit of the second point. Both are important, and together they form a compelling business case.

Operational efficiency

Customers running an on-premises model cannot take advantage of the same economy-of-scale benefits as an organization running BMC SaaS. Here is a set of common cost challenges that they face:

• Cost of infrastructure: While infrastructure is becoming more of a commodity and is much more affordable than it once was, ServiceOps use cases are becoming more advanced and require more powerful compute to function. This is particularly true of use cases that crunch a lot of data, such as proactive problem management and associated AIOps tools.
• New infrastructure skills: Running modern applications like BMC Helix, which take advantage of new innovative infrastructure like containers and serverless technologies, requires investment in a completely new set of skills. Think about how far infrastructure innovation has come over the past several years. How does an organization future-proof itself against requiring new skillsets in the future?
• Effort to support and maintain the platform: This refers to the other overheads associated with running the application, i.e., application patching, vulnerability management and zero-day vulnerabilities, upgrades, backups, disaster recovery, etc.

All these challenges can be eliminated with a move to the world-class BMC Helix SaaS solution.

The operational efficiency gains focus on the cost benefits of SaaS versus on-premises and are an important cornerstone to the business case, however, it is the next area, faster access to innovation, that provides significant benefits that will contribute to an organization’s digital transformation agenda.

BMC continues to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver new innovation across BMC Helix. These use cases help our customers gain a competitive edge by making them more agile and by improving the customer and end-user experience. Next, let’s explore why an on-premises customer might struggle to take advantage of this rapid rate of innovation:

• Infrequent upgrades: The average upgrade time for an on-premises customer is 18 months, compared with closer to six months for a SaaS customer, and that will continue to fall with our move to push upgrades.
• Less flexibility: If an organization wants to take advantage of some of the aforementioned data-crunching use cases, then they might require more compute power. With SaaS, it is as easy as raising a request in our SaaS operations portal.
• Adoption and value realization: Running a complex on-premises application like BMC Helix requires highly skilled application specialists. It would be more beneficial if those expensive resources were focused on more value-add activities. Is there a new BMC Helix Innovation Suite app they could be developing to meet business requirements? Is there some new workflow they could be developing to automate request fulfilment or remediation? The SaaS option also includes a BMC Customers Success Manager who advocates for our customers and drives value adoption to assist with business outcomes.

Our customers tend to extract significantly more value when they leave the “run” to BMC and focus on yielding as much return as possible out of their investment.

To be clear, for our customers who require data to be housed onsite, we are pleased to continue providing our BMC Helix on-premises option.

In the last year alone, BMC has released over 130 new capabilities across the BMC Helix platform and we are not slowing down. Put yourself in the best position to rapidly take advantage of this continuous innovation. Choose SaaS!

To learn more, visit bmc.com/helix.

In the ever-evolving landscape of IT service management, organizations are constantly seeking innovative solutions that can streamline operations, enhance productivity, and improve the overall employee experience. BMC Helix ITSM has been acknowledged as an ITSM category Leader in the recently published 2023 GigaOm Radar Report for IT Service Management (ITSM) for its advanced features, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and ability to mitigate service delivery risks. If you are a current customer of Remedy, BMC’s legacy ITSM solution, now is the time to consider migrating to BMC Helix ITSM.

The report evaluated the latest ITSM solutions available based on their comprehensive capabilities, recognizing 13 demonstrating sophisticated and comprehensive capabilities resulting from market maturity in the service management space. With its depth and breadth of functionality, BMC Helix ITSM met key criteria and received high scores in self-service, knowledge management, and asset discovery.

Driving business value through automation and AI

According to the report, “BMC Helix ITSM is a well-built ITSM platform with excellent use of AI, NLP, and intelligent heuristics. AI has been put to good use at all levels, and dashboards can be dynamic. Additionally, buyers that require customization are able to rely on a data model that enables user customization and an upgrade pathway for its on-premises ITSM solution.”

Margaret Lee, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Service and Operations Management at BMC, emphasizes the business value that modern ITSM can deliver, pointing out, “BMC believes that modern ITSM can deliver immense business value by helping organizations through automation and AI.”

BMC Helix ITSM stands at the forefront of IT service and operations management, delivering unparalleled innovation and transformative capabilities. We continue to redefine the possibilities of ITSM with AI-powered features, extensive digital employee experience personalization options, an integrated BMC Helix for ServiceOps platform, and a commitment to customer success.

The recognition of BMC Helix ITSM as a Leader by GigaOm reaffirms BMC’s commitment to empowering customers to harness the full potential of ITSM technology. Our solution enables them to deliver outstanding experiences, foster innovation, ensure operational excellence, and promote sustainability throughout the enterprise, with BMC as a trusted partner on their digital transformation journey.

To learn more, read the complete press release and download a complimentary copy of the 2023 GigaOm Radar Report for IT Service Management (ITSM) to see why BMC Helix ITSM is an industry-recognized SaaS solution for service management transformation.

As German businesses continue accelerating their migration to and use of public clouds, BMC is investing locally to give them even more choice and flexibility in the service management solutions space with a C5-attested software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix Discovery.

C5 is short for the Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog, a mandatory minimum baseline created by the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, or BSI) for cloud security and public cloud solutions used by German government agencies and organizations that work with government.

Initially made available in Germany in December 2022, BMC Helix ITSM is expected to attain C5 attestation in March 2023, giving German customers a secure, reliable, and regulation-compliant service management solution that processes and stores all data in local data centers. Our partner for hosting the solution is Materna Information & Communications SE, a well-known and top-rated service provider in Germany. With 25+ years of expertise in BMC products, Materna has a solid reputation for providing excellent services.

System maintenance and support will also be conducted exclusively within the European Union (EU) to comply with data privacy and data transfer export rules and meet regulations and industry standards including ISO27001 and ISO14001 from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO^®); Greenhouse Gas Protocol:2004; the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR); the aforementioned C5, and the Trusted Information Security Assessment Exchange (TISAX)*.

With BMC Helix ITSM SaaS, customers will be able to accelerate innovation, reduce business risk, and lower costs with a predictive solution that:

• Reduces response time with real-time auto-correlation of incidents and proactive problem identification
• Enables better partnership across business functions through contextual data sharing in collaboration tools
• Proactively manages change risk for IT and DevOps by determining impact and criticality
• Integrates service and operations management for major incident management and other ServiceOps use cases
• Eliminates manual effort with auto task-bundling and case assignment
• Extends service delivery to external providers via a no-code integration platform (iPaaS)
• Visualizes key metrics and service activity in personalized, customizable, dynamic dashboards

Here’s what Margaret Lee, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Digital Service and Operations Management at BMC, had to say about the announcement.

 
To learn more about BMC Helix ITSM, visit the web page here.
*Materna Information & Communications SE is participating in TISAX.

As more and more of our lives and businesses become digital, we’re continuously generating exponentially more data. How much? Well, Statista expects that we’ll generate 97 zettabytes of data in 2022 and almost double that to 181 zettabytes by 2025.

Organizations that know how to mine that data for valuable insights are the leaders not just in digital transformation, but also ensuring future success. But only 15 percent of big data projects make it to production. Businesses are also facing hurdles in successfully implementing DataOps, which is the application of agile engineering and DevOps best practices to the field of data management. DataOps enables businesses to rapidly turn new insights into fully operationalized production deliverables that unlock business value.

By managing and integrating data successfully, organizations can adjust, respond, and even predict and act autonomously to what is happening in the business, the industry, the market, or the world. DataOps brings together DevOps teams with data engineers, data scientists, and analytics teams to accelerate how data is collected, used, and analyzed, and determine where it gets applied.

In a new Intellyx white paper sponsored by BMC, Why DataOps is the Missing Piece of Your Cloud Migration Puzzle, analyst Charles Araujo explores the complexities of including DataOps in cloud migration planning. In the paper, he addresses the speed with which companies are adopting cloud infrastructures and the complication of including modern, data-driven applications in those plans when so much data still resides in traditional environments at the core of the enterprise technology stack.

The always-on world and its modern applications require on-demand and real-time data. Organizations migrating to cloud must find a balance between cloud-based, data-driven applications and traditional data sources by managing the flow of this new data pipeline and workload.

Araujo adds that modern applications will need to understand that data may not be available on demand, while traditional sources of data must have a way to make data readily available to, and align with, the needs of those new applications.

The dance necessary to pull this off—and the foundation for DataOps—is application and data workflow orchestration. Taking the traditional and long-proven approaches to data workflow orchestration and wrapping them in a set of new perspectives and technologies such as automation, intelligence, and analytics is integral to a DataOps strategy. By doing so, organizations gain visibility across the entire spectrum of the enterprise data pipeline, and improve its manageability in ever-changing, modern environments.

Download the full white paper, Why DataOps is the Missing Piece of Your Cloud Migration Puzzle, to learn more about successfully including DataOps and data workflow orchestration in your cloud strategy.

Adopting cloud computing provides a number of challenges for organizations, but managing cloud spend may be one of the most demanding. A survey of over 750 enterprises revealed that over 30% considered their cloud spend wasteful, and 80% stated that they found managing their cloud spend challenging.

Most organizations move their system to the cloud to reduce costs. A common mistake that many enterprises make when moving to the cloud is trying to follow the fastest path. They simply lift and shift the applications they were using from their in-house data center to a cloud infrastructure.

Most of the time, they find that this has not made these applications cheaper, scalable, faster, or more flexible. In fact, many enterprises are surprised to find that their costs go up instead of down. In many cases, the users within the organization may not even realize that the company invested a large amount of time and resources to move operations to the cloud because everything works predominantly the same.

Cloud cost optimization is a new discipline that organizations need to deploy cloud computing effectively. Here is some guidance to help you create a comprehensive and standardized optimization process to improve cloud cost.

(This article is part of our IT Cost Management Guide. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.)

Challenges to cloud optimization

When it comes to lowering the cost of cloud spend, many organizations run into significant issues such as:

• Complicated and multifaceted pricing structures
• Extreme cloud bill detail
• Ease of cloud service provisioning
• Continuous modifications to cloud offerings
• Excessive alternative architectures
• Lack of coherence across cloud platforms

Many times, advice on cost management provides a list of tasks like turning off unused instances and deleting unused storage. However, these practices do not give a comprehensive view of cost management. In fact, some of these tasks (like turning off unused instances) can even lead to disruption, frustration, and shadow IT.

Instead, it’s critical to create a strategic approach to cloud cost management. A set expectation is vital to keep spending within a certain budget. Plus, tracking and organizing costs around applications and centers will provide insights that cause cloud consumers to take a proactive approach to their spending.

Organizations need to develop sound financial management processes to prevent cloud overspending and create more efficient cloud service consumption.

Developing these processes will affect multiple departments and roles within the organization, such as the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE), I&O, finance, and users of the cloud services. These processes will translate into concrete management requirements and involve adopting new tools.

Four aspects of cloud cost optimization

Managing and optimizing cloud costs requires a multifaceted and comprehensive approach. Here are four steps to overseeing and improving cloud spending.

Create a plan

Random tactics will not guarantee that spending remains within expectations if no one knows what the expectations are. Organizations need to forecast their consumption and create budget expectations to stay within that forecast.

Organizations need to develop this capability and run processes before deploying applications, workloads, and projects in the cloud.

CCoE needs to define requirements to identify the exact outcomes that impact cloud services design and keep from overengineering applications. They need to gain a comprehensive understanding, questions assumptions and clarify what each application is accomplishing.

This step entails collaborating with product owners and stakeholders to gain an understanding of the value each application offers the organization. They also determine the key metrics that require the utilization of specific architectural principles.

Ask questions to help determine workload requirements:

• How sensitive is the data the workload handles?
• What happens if the data remains unavailable for a certain amount of time or is lost altogether? Does this application require service-level objectives?
• What is the desired performance target?
• Does the data require compliance with any industry-specific regulations, such as HIPAA?

This step also required choosing pricing models that best suit your organization. Model prices will vary depending on factors such as data integrity, service availability, embedded license-based software, and performance targets. It’s critical to find which pricing model meets your budget and your organization’s needs.

Increase spend visibility

When you’ve established your budget, landed on your pricing model, and deployed the application, maintaining visibility is critical. Create an organized view of costs outside of the bill itself. The amount of data makes manually managing each line item most likely unsuccessful. Plus, it won’t allow you to get a daily view of spending, which is critical for optimization.

Define which metrics are critical to track for your organization. These metrics are crucial to building dashboards and reports, as well as maintaining automation workflows to optimize spending. Some metrics to track include:

• Cost of services
• Capacity
• Utilization
• Availability
• Performance

Every major cloud provider utilizes tags (or labels) as a fundamental governance construct. These tags are a critical tool for cost tracking. They allow customizable names, multilateral structures and can be implemented across multiple clouds.

While tags will appear in bills after implementation, they do not appear on previous bills, so it’s critical to implement tags as quickly as possible to enable cost tracking.

Building dashboards and reports and updating them daily are critical for staying on top of spend. These reports include:

• Top and least spenders
• Trending daily, monthly, quarterly, and annual patterns
• Actual versus planned spending
• Overall spending
• Estimated spending waste

Decrease spending

Once you’ve set goals and enabled visibility, you can better identify ways to reduce waste. Because you’ve completed the first two steps, reducing waste won’t require changing application code or architecture. Plus, it’s also easier to implement and calculate ROI with tracking already in place. Some ways to reduce spending include:

Discard unused resources. Although it may seem like an obvious measure, it is an uncommon practice for many traditional data centers. Find any resources that your organization has deployed but does not use. In particular, find allocation-based resources that accrue cost regardless of their usage. Some examples include old snapshots, unused storage volumes, idle compute instances and unassigned IP addresses. To ensure that it is truly unused, mark them first and then notify owners to solicit an action from them.

Schedule services. It is common for organizations to have resources idle at specific hours or days. Reduce waste by scheduling cloud services based on these expected patterns. Do this by describing it with a “duty schedule” tag. Any cron-like scheduler can then read that tag value and schedule services correspondingly.

Optimize allocation-based services. These types of services require users to request particular allocation when provisioning. Instead, adjust the size of your allocation to fit the actual workload demand to reduce costs. Container, compute, storage, database, and application services are all good places to start.

Utilize discounts. Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) models don’t work for every organization. If your workload is relatively stable and your utilization in the future is predictable, you might be able to get discounted prices. Some cloud providers offer discounts that you can purchase programmatically. You can also contact your sales rep to negotiate a deal by committing to a minimum spend.

Upgrade instance generation. Cloud providers have refreshed their computer platforms over the years to provide renewed power to certain use cases. These instances are also often less expensive because they are more efficient than previous generations. As a result, you will want to optimize across instance families with these updates. You may be able to opt for a new instance generation and get the same performance with a smaller size.

Optimize resources

Reducing spending is only part of the strategic techniques to lower cloud costs. Organizations also need to optimize their processes to reduce their need for certain resources.

Find preemptible instances. Particular cloud providers offer a much lower price point for compute instances instead of the PAYG model. However, preemptible are riskier in that providers can terminate them at any time based on demand. Identify components and use cases in your application’s architecture that may be suitable in the case of suddenly unavailable infrastructure. Batch workloads, for example, can simply be put on pause if infrastructure becomes unavailable and resume when it’s available again.

Adjust data storage. Not all data is equally important, and some require less access as it ages. For example, social media data becomes less important as time goes on. Optimize costs by storing old or less important data in a less expensive service or tier.

(Explore data storage types & storage temperatures.)

Utilize serverless. Serverless computing requires organizations to give up ownership of their application infrastructure to a third-party cloud provider. However, they get to experience zero-touch autoscaling, dynamic deployment, and enhanced efficiencies in resource utilization.

While serverless computing services can seem cost-effective, there is a certain point where it does become cost-prohibitive and offers a diminishing return. As a result, organizations should aim to leverage serverless technology for the right use cases.

Utilize horizontal autoscaling. Autoscaling, or enabling applications to increase or decrease in response to events, can significantly optimize costs. However, autoscaling is either “vertical,” making one instance bigger, or “horizontal,” adding more instances of a similar type and distributing them across.

Both forms of autoscaling can reduce costs and have their place in optimizing. Horizontal autoscaling needs certain design principles built into the application architecture. Applications must be allowed to run multiple instances in parallel. Plus, it needs to be to start and shutdown seamlessly and not rely on local dependencies. It’s an effective practice that makes the application more resilient and must be used alongside optimizing allocation-based services because they apply to different sets of applications.

While the initial process requires following each step, this process is iterative. Lowering cloud costs is not a one-step process and does not always require following the steps in order. Instead, it requires going back over each aspect of optimization to find areas to reduce spending.

Best practices for cloud cost optimization

Let’s review some tips for how to optimize cloud cost.

Identify stakeholders

Optimization is not limited to your finance team. Successfully optimizing costs requires everyone’s buy-in and should be spread across your organization. Some stakeholders to consider include:

• Managers
• Product owners
• DevOps
• Finance department
• CCoE

Implement accountability

Keeping costs down is a part of everyone’s job. The IT and financial departments have long had separate goals. However, IT needs to be accountable for its budget. Chargeback models that calculate and charge based on unit costs can help increase accountability. It can also make costs a part of every department.

Implementing a fair chargeback model can increase awareness and help lower costs.

Utilize tools

The right tools can help your organizations gain visibility and critical insights to increase optimizations. Some tools to consider include:

• Dashboard visualization
• Heat maps
• Cloud cost intelligence
• Container cost optimization

Summing up cloud costs

As IT and cloud operations teams start to work on optimizing their cloud implementations, many find that the efforts required are more complicated than they anticipated. By applying the principles above, you can start to control spending, establish realistic cloud operations budgets, and ultimately reduce costs and waste.

Related reading

• BMC Multi-Cloud Blog
• How to Accurately Estimate the Cost of Cloud Migrations
• How Multi-Cloud Can Enable Cost Savings
• Cloud Compliance: Best Practices for Success

After years of experimentation, business organizations are adopting cloud computing at scale. They have remained skeptical of their ability to manage regulatory compliance and security of sensitive information assets.

As they transition mission-critical IT workloads and apps to the cloud, their security posture is possibly a tradeoff between cost and performance of the cloud service. This is partly because government institutions mandate vastly different measures and policies on cloud computing. These mandates aren’t optional—the related fines and lawsuits are not the only implications of failure to compliance.

Today’s internet browsers are increasingly aware of their rights to data privacy and online security. Organizations that fail to protect user information stored in the cloud due to inadequate security measures as mandated by regulatory compliance therefore also compromise user trust and brand loyalty.

Since these regulations lay down the bare minimum requirements on security in the cloud, it’s important to understand cloud compliance regulations and follow the industry proven best practices on cloud security and governance.

Cloud compliance stats

Compliance of cloud-based solutions is one of the leading challenges facing organizations that aim to migrate existing workloads to the cloud. According to recent research surveys:

• 94% of IT and security professionals believe that compliance is a top priority for their organization. At the same time, 45% are also not concerned about penalties for noncompliance.
• More than 50% of the organizations face the compliance and audit challenges associated with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud solutions.
• 32% of the organizations found incorrect access authorizations and privileges assigned to users. 60% are considered as shadow administrators.
• Under two-thirds (63%) of users pause to consider the organization’s data collection and storage practices before sharing sensitive information with them.
• Data classification due to cloud computing makes real and true encryption a challenge, according to 65% of organizations.

Cloud compliance regulations

Let’s begin the discussion with a quick review of the common cloud compliance regulations applicable to organizations in different industry verticals:

• HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) mandates security of electronic healthcare information, confidentiality and privacy of health related information, and information access for insurance.
• PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is a set of security standards that enable all organizations to accept, process, store and transmit credit card and financial information.
• GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) requires organizations to communicate how user information is shared and protected, provide right to opt-out and apply specific mandated protections.
• PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) provides rules for organizations to handle user information in conducting commercial activities.
• EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the most stringent privacy and security regulations, mandate an exhaustive set of requirements on organizations handling data of European Union (EU) residents. GDPR imposes harsh penalties for noncompliance.
• SOX (Sarbanes–Oxley Act) mandates requirements on financial disclosures, audits, and controls of information systems processing financial information.
• U.S. State Breach Laws: All 50 U.S. states require organizations to notify individuals in event of security breaches involving their personally identifiable information.
• NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is the organization that provides guidelines on technology related matters such as standards, security, innovation, and economic competitiveness.
• FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) is a standardized program for security assessment and evaluation of cloud-based systems.

How to achieve cloud compliance

Cloud compliance regulations are constantly changing and updated to meet the growing demands of information security and user privacy. Adhering to the exhaustive set of cloud compliance regulations seems like a daunting task but we’ve put together a few important tips to successfully achieve compliance in the cloud:

Know your compliance regulations

Compliance is not easy but getting to know the applicable regulations is the first step toward achieving compliance. Understanding the regulations and optimizing the compliance infrastructure may require external assistance through consultants and experts, which is costly—but not as expensive as noncompliance.

Know your responsibilities

Cloud vendors typically only offer a model of shared responsibility as it pertains to security and compliance. It’s important to fully understand your own responsibilities and adopt the measures necessary to guarantee compliance from your end.

Manage information access & controls

Monitor how your data in the cloud is accessed and controlled. Look out for identity and access control lapses or anomalous behavior. Adopt the principle of least privilege access: users are allowed to access only the information and resources necessary, and no more.

Conduct audits routinely

Examine cloud compliance regularly. Identify the shortcomings of your IT environment as well as the organizational culture and workforce behavior, which may involve practices directly and indirectly violating compliance regulations.

Know how your data is stored

IT workloads are shared dynamically between hardware resources that make up a cloud environment. Especially for hybrid and multi-cloud environments, make sure that your IT asset distribution is optimized for minimal security risk.

Encrypt, encrypt, encrypt

Always encrypt sensitive business information, which means that the data remains secure even when it is compromised. Apply multiple layers of security where necessary and viable.

Related reading

• BMC Security & Compliance Blog
• BMC Multi-Cloud Blog
• What Is GRC? Governance, Risk, and Compliance Explained
• SecOps vs InfoSec: An IT Security Comparison
• Multi-Cloud vs Hybrid Cloud: What’s The Difference?
• The State of SaaS Today: Growth Trends & Statistics

Gone are the days of cloud environments being a luxury for the modern enterprise—today they are a complete necessity. For organizations across all industries, having the ability to choose the cloud environment that makes the most sense for the business is important.

But when it comes to the different types of clouds, it can quickly get confusing, specifically with names like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud.

The confusion between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is compounded by the fact that they’re often used interchangeably. Although it can seem like a semantic argument, there is a real difference between the two, and the distinction will only continue to grow more important as multi-cloud models become the norm.

So, what are the differences between hybrid cloud and multi-cloud? Why would a company choose one or the other? Let’s break it down.

(Get the basics right with our private vs public cloud comparison.)

What is multi-cloud?

Simply put, multi-cloud means that an organization uses multiple cloud services—services like SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. These cloud services are public, and are often from numerous different cloud providers. Public clouds are those in which businesses or individuals outsource application and/or infrastructure hosting to a third party, like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.

There are a variety of reasons that a company might choose to use multiple clouds, including:

• Achieving best-of-breed results for different requirements and departments
• Decreasing costs
• Increasing flexibility
• Avoiding vendor lock-in
• Minimizing dependence on any particular provider

Whatever the reason for their multi-cloud strategy, an organization’s multiple public clouds usually need to operate in combination with other types of cloud environments to fully encompass all of the organization’s needs.

(Learn all about setting up your multi-cloud strategy.)

What is a hybrid cloud?

Enter: the hybrid cloud. A hybrid cloud combines the public cloud with a private cloud, which is solely dedicated to the end-user. Traditionally, private clouds were located within the user’s firewall, on-premises, but now they are more commonly built on rented, vendor-owned data centers off-premises.

Hybrid cloud differs from multi-cloud in two big ways:

• It usually includes a combination of private and public clouds.
• Its data and processes typically intermingle, working to complement each other, instead of staying in their own separate silos.

Similar to multi-cloud, there are some common reasons why businesses would choose to utilize a hybrid cloud:

• Maintaining private infrastructure, including easy accessibility security, compliance, and disaster recovery
• Embracing agile ways of working while streamlining daily workflows and functionality
• Scaling in the most cost- and resource-effective way
• Ensuring highly sensitive data and information remains on-premises

Multi vs hybrid cloud: How to choose

Finding the right variety of cloud deployments and services comes down to a number of factors, such as:

Cost

A majority of the time public clouds come with less overhead than other types of similar infrastructures, making a multi-cloud model a good option for those looking to cut costs. The cloud vendor itself handles the responsibilities that come with maintaining a data center such as security updates and provisioning servers. This helps take those tasks, and expenses, off of the end-user.

(Consider the differences between CapEx & OpEx.)

Security

As mentioned, a hybrid model allows businesses to utilize the scaling benefits of a public cloud with the privacy and security assurances of an on-premises infrastructure.

For institutions with highly confidential information—healthcare providers, financial firms, corporations, legal entities—it makes sense, and minimizes risk, to secure this data on private clouds.

(Explore cloud security best practices.)

Hybrid cloud vs multi-cloud

At the end of the day, while the terminology may be complicated, both models offer organizations the precision to provide business services in an efficient and effective way. No matter what you call it, the use of multiple clouds is here to stay.

BMC supports modern enterprises—in the cloud & on-premises

At BMC, we’re always looking for ways to help you do business better. Whether you’re working in the cloud, on-premises, or—our hunch—a mix of both, we’re here to help. Start with this free (!) tool that estimates the cost of any cloud migration.

Related reading

• BMC Multi-Cloud Blog
• Common Roles in Cloud Computing
• Single Tenant vs Multi-Tenant Architecture
• Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) Explained
• Availability Regions and Zones for AWS, Azure & GCP
• The Cloud Today: Growth, Trends, Market Share & Outlook