Informative post from CA World...

'Realizing IT to the Business Alignment with CA's Data Center of the Future' via The CA Cloud Storm Chasers by Meghan Stabler

 For those that are not here at CA World 2010 you are missing some of the most significant announcements in the recent history of CA. First was the renaming, or rather rebranding of the company from CA Inc, to CA Technologies. Why is that significant to me? Well this is my second ‘tour of duty' having left CA back in 2000 after five years as an SVP of Global Marketing. At that time CA ‘Software Superior by Design' was in the process of being rebranded to ‘CA, Inc.' Yet even with this shift in brand name, design, colors and high-level message we also introduced CA's vision and strategy for managing the Data Center of the Future. A future that is highly virtualized, that takes advantage of the various cloud types, and that incorporates everything from physical to virtual, mainframe to distributed and beyond. This is significant to CA Technologies and customers.

So what is it?

Simply put, it is CA's proven five-stage lifecycle approach to managing the new highly virtualized and/or cloud based Data Center. 

So, how do you make virtualization and cloud computing work for the business without introducing yet another layer of complexity and cost?  Well the transformation to the cloud and virtualization of resources is possible with CA - and our continuous lifecycle approach to assess, deploy, assure and secure your Data Center of the Future -- making IT agility possible. You see fundamentally our vision isn't to just manage technology, it's to use IT solutions to identify and accelerate what truly lies in the cloud - opportunity, value and business benefit.

No matter what maturity your IT is at, it starts with assessing your IT assets and capabilities- that's not just hardware, software, people and projects, but also capacity, energy consumption and even security policies. Examination helps customers identify where virtualization will provide customers the most impact, logistically and financially.

As customers catalog their resources and services, you start to build out self-service capabilities - putting control in the hands of your customers and - after all, they know what they want, how long the need it for and what they're prepared to pay!  During the assessment, you'll embed rigorous best practices and processes, benchmarking the effectiveness of your IT operation or those delivered by cloud providers.

Next, you need automation to deploy services across a diverse technology resource pool that's not only highly virtualized but includes physical capital expense items. Although beneficial, automation alone isn't enough. Using orchestration, customers can purposefully drive IT from a business perspective - one that is dynamically and rapidly provisioning resources according to business performance and service levels.

Once you've assessed and deployed. You must now assure that those services are monitored and managed from top-to-bottom and end-to-end. When something goes wrong it's about identifying which technology layer is impacted and whether it's a configuration or resource issue.  Here it's all about the user experience and higher degrees of customer satisfaction and resource optimization.

And while you provide performance assurance, all of this needs to be secured.  Security policies must be applied against current regulations and match the technology, information and end user needs, ensuring that the virtual layer is secure. Quick deployment of these policies also delivers continuous compliance with global regulations.

Finally with agility, customers can build and optimize scalable, reliable resources without sacrificing timeliness. On-demand access to a pool of dynamically configurable computing resources can be achieved quickly and aligned with transactional requirements and contracts.  This enables customers to respond to the immediate business needs by maximizing service delivery, flexibility and choice.

With agility you can deploy entire applications to the cloud and manage them as a whole. This allows customers to monitor and manage service level agreements across the service portfolio based on business terms. With agility, you can finally innovate IT in a manner that aligns with the business.

 click here for the original article via the CA community