Business-driven IT Management Research Articles

Business-driven service placement for highly dynamic and distributed cloud systems

The emergence of large-scale Cloud computing environments characterized by dynamic resource pricing schemes enables valuable cost saving opportunities for service providers that could dynamically decide to change the placement of their IT service components in order to reduce their bills. However, that requires new management solutions to dynamically reconfigure IT service components placement, in order to respond to pricing changes and to control and guarantee the high-level business objectives defined by service providers. This paper proposes a novel approach based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimization techniques for adaptive business-driven IT service component reconfiguration. Our proposal allows to evaluate the performance of complex IT services deployments over large-scale Cloud systems in a wide range of alternative configurations, by granting prompt transitions to more convenient placements as business values and costs change dynamically. We deeply assessed our framework in a realistic scenario that consists of 2-tier service architectures with real-world pricing schemes. Collected results show the effectiveness and quantify the overhead of our solution. The results also demonstrate the suitability of business-driven IT management techniques for service components placement and reconfiguration in highly dynamic and distributed Cloud systems.

A Risk Management Framework for Cloud Migration Decision Support

Keywords: risk management framework; risk assessment; cloud migration; security; analytic hierarchy process (AHP); business value

Business-Driven IT Management Coming of Age

The 7th IEEE/IFIP International Workshop on Business-Driven IT Management (BDIM 2012) was held on April 20, 2012 in Maui, USA, in conjunction with the 13th IEEE/IFIP International Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2012) conference. This paper reports on the BDIM 2012 workshop, describing in summary the keynote and the technical paper sessions and provides a high-level view of the discussions that took place during the workshop as well as of the current state of the research activities in Business-Driven IT Management.

Model-based qualitative risk assessment for availability of IT infrastructures

For today's organisations, having a reliable information system is crucial to safeguard enterprise revenues (think of on-line banking, reservations for e-tickets etc.). Such a system must often offer high guarantees in terms of its availability; in other words, to guarantee business continuity, IT systems can afford very little downtime. Unfortunately, making an assessment of IT availability risks is difficult: incidents affecting the availability of a marginal component of the system may propagate in unexpected ways to other more essential components that functionally depend on them. General-purpose risk assessment (RA) methods do not provide technical solutions to deal with this problem. In this paper we present the qualitative time dependency (QualTD) model and technique, which is meant to be employed together with standard RA methods for the qualitative assessment of availability risks based on the propagation of availability incidents in an IT architecture. The QualTD model is based on our previous quantitative time dependency (TD) model (Zambon et al. in BDIM '07: Second IEEE/IFIP international workshop on business-driven IT management. IEEE Computer Society Press, pp 75---83, 2007), but provides more flexible modelling capabilities for the target of assessment. Furthermore, the previous model required quantitative data which is often too costly to acquire, whereas QualTD applies only qualitative scales, making it more applicable to industrial practice. We validate our model and technique in a real-world case by performing a risk assessment on the authentication and authorisation system of a large multinational company and by evaluating the results with respect to the goals of the stakeholders of the system. We also perform a review of the most popular standard RA methods and discuss which type of method can be combined with our technique.

Business-driven IT management - upping the ante of IT : exploring the linkage between it and business to improve both IT and business results

Unlike the conventional way of managing IT that uses technical objectives and metrics only, such as availability, response time, and throughput, business-driven IT management (BDIM) drives IT management decisions from a business perspective by adding business measures, such as profit, cost, and customer experience. Research on BDIM is gathering interest in both academia and industry worldwide. This article introduces BDIM, discusses how it can be enacted, and illustrates its benefits and gains over conventional IT management.

Change Priority Determination in IT Service Management Based on Risk Exposure

In the Change Management process within IT Service Management, some activities need to evaluate the risk exposure associated with changes to be made to the infrastructure and services. The paper presents a method to evaluate risk exposure associated with a change. Further, we show how to use the risk exposure metric to automatically assign priorities to changes. The formal model developed for this purpose captures the business perspective by using financial metrics in the evaluation of risk. Thus the method is an example of Business-Driven IT Management. A case study, performed in conjunction with a large IT service provider, is reported and provides good results when compared to decisions made by human managers.