Applicability of IT service management in the migration to cloud computing

The cloud computing (CC) paradigm is transforming the way Information Technology (IT)

services are provided by converting IT products into services. This modification allows the

delivery of IT services to end users in a way the customers stop purchasing products and

start purchasing services instead. The successful migration to this paradigm by an organization

requires a deep comprehension of its own IT as well as the dynamics of CC. To this

purpose, a framework aggregating the activities that must be undertaken in two groups, the

on premise and the off premise, was developed. The on premise group includes the actions

developed by the customer, such as the development of a strategy plan, the attainment of a

detailed definition of the organization processes and services and the definition of what to

migrate to the cloud. The activities developed with the support of the candidates and selected

CSPs are in the off premise group. This group encompasses activities such as the

providers services’, the details ‘identification of the technologies related to the implementation

of the organization processes into the cloud and the analysis of the conditions of

service level agreement and the contract.

Furthermore, there is already an extensive set of recommendations for IT management and

IT governance in general – such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library

(ITIL) and the Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT) recommendations.

However, the field of CC remains poorly covered. Acknowledging this

state of affairs and adding the fact that CC is concerned with IT services, not to mention

the number of organizations using ITIL in order to manage their IT services, the fact that

ITIL is being recognized as a set of good practices, led to the decision of studying the

applicability of service management, namely ITIL, to the migration of IT services to CC.

The motivation of this study is related to the circumstance that organizations can take advantage

of the work already carried out, the information gathered and the management of

services when implementing ITIL. Additionally, if the customer and the supplier implement

ITIL, the communication between them is also improved. Accordingly, a framework

to migrate IT services, applications data and infrastructures to CC has been developed and

the processes of this framework have been mapped to the ITIL’s framework.