Businesses need to look beyond Cloud infrastructure and focus on IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) instead of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), according to Citrix Cloud platforms chief technology officer, Dr. Sheng Liang.
He was speaking at the Citrix’s Synergy 2013 conference, held in Los Angeles.
Liang claimed moving from IaaS to ITaaS is a paradigm shift for IT personnel but the move needs to be made with the end user in mind.
“End users don’t care about infrastructures, they only care about how to access the apps on the Cloud and the services associated with it,” he said.
Liang highlighted the role of a services broker within this space.
“IT plays the role of aggregation and the mindset of IT personnel is changing. The services broker is a vital element of the transition,” he mentioned.
According to Liang, IT should be viewed as a business role instead of a technology role.
“Businesses now have to look at a whole range of services, including the Cloud. This leads to a future need of a broker of Cloud portals as a service.”
Liang mentioned that the services broker will be able to deliver multiple Cloud services, enable IT to pay for Cloud services on behalf of employees, and allow a faster approval workflow.
“This is the ideal win-win situation for both businesses and service providers. The focus now, is on intermediation to provide a commodotised set of services. But, we are still at the beginning of ITaaS and businesses should leverage it at its early stages to benefit from it,” he added.
Hafizah Osman attended Citrix Synergy ’13 as a guest of Citrix.
