ITaaS can Increase Efficiency and Reduce Cost While also Supporting IT Transformation

Discover how implementing automated IT service delivery can help organizations to realize significant business benefits as they work towards transforming their IT infrastructure.

In the last of a series of blogs inspired by influential research published by industry analyst ESG, we explore the impact that implementing automated IT service delivery can have on an organization’s ability to achieve IT Transformation. 

Of all the ways an organization can modernize and automate its IT infrastructure, opting to adopt an IT as a Service cloud operating model is one of the most effective in terms of making progress towards full IT Transformation.

With IT as a Service (ITaaS), much of the infrastructure provisioning, configuration and change management is automated. This means that line of business end-users and developers are largely able to self-serve and manage on-premises IT resources as and when their needs and workload demands change.

In an organization that’s successfully running ITaaS, management and orchestration software and API workflows combine to automate the delivery of services through hybrid and multi-cloud architectures ­– delivering a user experience that’s timely, responsive, cost transparent and sufficiently agile to fuel innovation.

The advantages of automated IT service delivery

While successfully leveraging automated IT service delivery is a key measurement of broader IT Transformation, it also offers major operational benefits on its own.

New research by industry analyst ESG1 has shown that there’s a positive correlation between running an ITaaS cloud operating model and increased IT and business agility, more streamlined operations, improved end-user satisfaction and – perhaps most importantly – greater business success.

One of the core functions of a cloud operations model is to reduce IT operational ‘friction’ – in everything from defining workload requirements and procuring infrastructure, all the way through to integrating and deploying systems. At organizations running ITaaS, requirements come straight from end-users; they select what they need from an IT-vetted service catalog. The infrastructure to fulfill their ‘orders’ is allocated from the organization’s highly virtualized and automated data center resources. It’s an approach that eliminates meetings, wait times and deployment times – leading to both greater IT agility and improved business agility.

Running ITaaS also removes manual IT-related bottlenecks to service delivery, which yields significant efficiency benefits across an organization. These include IT projects being completed under budget and IT staff being freed up from routine tasks such as deploying, managing, and monitoring infrastructure to focus on higher-value activities such as IT architecting, planning, and application development.

But that’s not all. To top it off, organizations running ITaaS also report higher levels of business success and being more optimistic about their competitive positions compared with companies that are yet to explore the advantages of automated IT service delivery.

How does implementing ITaaS affect IT maturity?

The new research study demonstrates that making the move to automated IT service delivery can play a key role in increasing an organization’s operational agility as well as its ability to achieve full IT Transformation.

Earlier this year, ESG conducted a survey of 4,000 IT executives from private- and public-sector organizations across 16 countries to evaluate their progress in embracing IT Transformation2 – and rank them as ‘Legacy’, ‘Emerging’, ‘Evolving’ or ‘Transformed’.

It discovered that ‘Transformed’ companies were nearly 10X more likely to be running ITaaS than ‘Evolving’ organizations (58% versus 6%). Of particular note was the fact that not one of the ‘Emerging’ and ‘Legacy’ organizations surveyed by ESG reported using ITaaS.

These statistics are now detailed in ESG’s Research Insights Brief on the fundamental role that automated IT service delivery plays in IT Transformation1.

ITaaS delivers clear benefits and supports IT Transformation

Overall, the ESG research found that moving to automated IT service delivery delivers significant operational and wider business benefits.

Compared with ‘Legacy’ organizations, the ‘Transformed’ organizations in the study – those companies that are leveraging ITaaS – are typically:

◈ 5X more likely to be ahead of their competitors in time to market (76% versus 14%).

◈ Nearly 15X more likely to report completing application deployments ahead of schedule (44% versus 3%).

◈ 5X more likely to operate an on-site infrastructure that’s as cost-effective (or more so) than the public cloud (71% versus 27%).

◈ 5X more likely to exceed their revenue goals by more than 10%.

◈ Completing 13% more projects ahead of schedule.

Do you have customers and prospects who would be interested in achieving this level of business success and operational efficiency? Of course you do! Take the time to introduce them to the business benefits that automated IT service delivery can bring to their organizations.