The Services Portfolio

Similarly, an effective application management strategy in a virtualized environment begins with a framework or process that can inventory, track, and monitor the myriad applications in the environment.  Such an initiative begins with a prioritization of applications, identifying those that are strategically and operationally critical, as well as those that are unimportant, redundant, or obsolete, and therefore candidates for elimination.

The process involves mapping each application against ten criteria, each of which is described in greater detail below. In any given situation, a subset of this list will often be identified as most important for an organization.

• Strategic significance
• Purpose
• Functional Adequacy 
• Technical Adequacy
• Application skill set
• External Support capabilities
• Criticality
• Stability
• Complexity
• Satisfaction

Once the key criteria are selected, each one must be thoroughly assessed and scored. For example, a review of "Strategic Significance" must examine the application's role in advancing the organization's business strategy.  Specific issues to address include identifying the customer or business sectors that the application supports, and whether control of the application resides with the business units or the IT organization.

An assessment of "Purpose," meanwhile, examines the application's original purpose in the context of existing business requirements, focusing on whether those requirements have changed, and if the application is still relevant.

Once each of the criteria is scored, a picture of the overall effectiveness of the application portfolio emerges, as shown in the diagram above. In this instance, the red line shows the performance of the environment being analyzed, while the black line shows the average of the comparative reference group. (The further the line extends to the edge of the octagon, the better the performance.)

This assessment then needs to be tied back to the overall services required by the business to determine if in a virtualized environment these applications can still provide the services required by the business, and if overlapping and redundant services and solutions exist that now need to be retired and or replaced.

With a virtualization architecture in place, the application portfolio alignment approach provides the enterprise with insight into which applications are required to support current and future business needs.  It now becomes possible to develop a business case for re-architecting the applications tied to business services and to move the organization away from an inefficient tower-by-tower IT solutions approach. 

Additionally, the traditional approach to controlling and monitoring network and user access to applications is now linked to business services, and the underlying applications become transparent to the organization.  Configuration of the virtual architecture is vital to ensuring that the proper strict controls on user access are reviewed and updated when new services or applications are introduced into an existing virtualized environment.

It is also important to note that, although a virtualized environment allows greater optimization of available resources, it also requires greater planning for future growth and balancing of the workload to ensure the needs of applications sharing resources are not overloaded.