Cloud computing is the antidote to inflexible, overly complex IT infrastructures. It’s not an end state you can jump to instantaneously, but a transition achieved in stages. To guide and assist you on your path, VMware provides The VMware Journey, a proven and practical implementation roadmap designed to deliver benefits as you go.

During each phase, IT becomes more agile, responsive, and efficient; ROI increases while IT costs go down. The journey culminates in a cloud that is uniquely yours—a private, public, or hybrid cloud environment perfectly aligned with your individual business needs and goals.

Phase 3: IT as a Service

During this final phase of the Journey, the organization approaches the desired end-state of an enterprise hybrid cloud, in which IT provides the highest business value at the lowest possible cost: IT as a service (ITaaS). With a highly automated, low-maintenance cloud infrastructure in place, IT can focus on delivering innovations that drive revenue growth, enhance the customer experience, and minimize business and compliance risk.

Enabling Business Agility: IT Fulfills Its Strategic Role

Ideally at this stage every IT service is fully defined in terms of its components, resources, and delivery guarantees. Business units can select and obtain resources through a standardized and automated self-service catalog or on-demand. This reduces provisioning time to a fraction of what it once was. Lines of business are expensed for IT services via transparent chargeback and detailed reporting.

With advanced management tools in place from the desktop to the datacenter, IT achieves unprecedented gains in performance, availability, scalability, and responsiveness—all while maintaining full control, airtight security, and compliance.

• Download a joint whitepaper from VMware and CIO.com, Boldly Navigating Towards IT-as-a-Service and learn how innovative CIO’s are forging ahead through the virtualization journey towards an IT-as-a-Service model. (Registration required)

On the infrastructure level, the private and public domains of the enterprise hybrid cloud interoperate seamlessly: applications are automatically and dynamically shifted between internal and external infrastructure to cost-effectively accommodate fluctuating user demand. Each workload runs in the environment best suited to its business purpose, boosting agility without diminishing security, reliability, or governance.

With its attention, assets, and resources fully focused on business optimization, IT collaborates closely with lines of business, driving continuous improvements in outbound IT service levels, including high-governance workloads.

In this third and maturing phase, cloud computing demonstrably accelerates business agility, propelling the enterprise forward through:

• Greatly reduced time to market for critical business services and initiatives
• The consistent ability to anticipate and exploit market opportunities ahead of the competition
• Significant improvements in the customer experience
• Dramatically lower total cost of IT ownership