What is ITaaS?                 

That question gets asked a lot, if you aren’t a CIO who is trying to get a budget approved you probably have no idea. IT as a Service is the idea of providing charge back capability for the IT industry internal to each organization. So if the Finance group uses X amount of processing power the IT group can gain a higher share of their annual budget for the necessary compute power.

So fast forward to today, now ITaaS is the buzz “word” or acronym, that means let’s put it in the data center on a VM and provide it to the end user via a delivery mechanism, universally to any device. So what is the latest and greatest to the table? VaaS, Voice as a Service, now you can virtualize the voice infrastructure and provide the end users with soft phones or SIPIP phones across the same network as your data, only a VLAN away. The solution which is furthest along is Mitel, who actually have a full range of virtual appliances capable of running on VMware ESXi that provide not only voice, but instant messaging, web presence, and collaboration capabilities. With the ability to stand these services up with VMware’s Site Recovery Management (SRM) and the universality of SIP trunk delivery, voice for the first time can be treated like the critical app it is, and be included in the Disaster Recovery, and Business Continuity Planning of your organization.

You may not know what ITaaS is, but if you are reading this blog you probably want a bigger IT budget, and the more you can provide in your data infrastructure the easier it is to justify that budget. Look around your server room at the names on the labels, you will see SharePoint, Deltek, SAP, etc, then you look at the back wall at your PBX or in the rack at the Cisco Call Management suite that is run by the telecom guys and not the IT team, and let the dollar signs roll around in your head. You will realize real quick that if you want the latest technology in your IT dept the fastest way to get their is to start looking at providing everything as a service, and reducing your footprint through virtualization to reduce the capital costs of running the server farm to do it.

What has ITaaS done for you?

For more information check out this article from Boston Technology I think it delves into the issue really well covering all the business aspects.