IT in an Enterprise - Is “Cloud App Support” next?

Information Technology in an enterprise has evolved and have made significant progress in adopting practices to reduce costs - which include outsourcing, cloud computing, open source and other such models.

The main area of focus for any organizations CIO is to find creative and effective ways to reduce IT cost, improve service levels and align technology to meet business goals. The most challenging part of this is to reduce the application maintenance costs, often termed as the (core) support costs.

Traditional approach is to allocate a retainer bucket that assigns minimum number of resources that are required to keep the lights on  (to support/troubleshoot outages as they happen) and also to handle production support or technology upgrade related activities.

With the evolving technology models like Cloud computing where the organizations pay as they use services, have helped organizations reduce ongoing technology infrastructure and licensing costs.

The question is that can the same approach be applied, when it comes to supporting applications. Should we call it “Cloud App Support”.

Cloud Application Support could be an approach where the activities can be priced individually, rather than having a retainer bucket. Of course the budget needs to be forecasted but this will give the flexibility to keep the costs variable instead of fixed depending upon the usage.

There will be challenges related to pricing and resource management for the service providers. Applying algorithms that account for common skills, volume and transition costs could mitigate these challenges. 

The question is would this approach be beneficial to the CIOs of the organizations?