IT integrator opinion: Eight stages of IT maturity

The point of consumption is most currently seen as the business user, but making the IT department the point of consumption is the ultimate goal.

As the international business climate becomes increasingly competitive and the labour force more dispersed, delivering IT as an accountable, automated service becomes a matter of survival.

The technologies and techniques are well practiced and proven, but few corporate IT facilities have the luxury of "starting over" - so a phased transition is prescribed.

This document is our ongoing attempt to categorise and catalogue the stages of IT maturity leading to the “holy grail” - a fully dynamic, on-demand data centre.

Let's take the business applications themselves. As software they must interact with the infrastructure (servers, networks & storage), people and other software.

Advances in virtual infrastructure (servers, networks and storage) have allowed applications to roam freely between the data centre and hosted facilities - leaving software as the service layer.

The emergence of cloud computing allows the software to interact with each other and therefore infrastructure, over the Internet. We now have the tools to transform IT into a true service.

By embracing virtualisation and automation, we can liberate the IT infrastructure - reducing costs (especially labour) and scaling capacity up & down as required.