Contributed Article. Author: Derick Townsend,
ServiceMesh VP of Product Marketing

In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of leveraging cloud to greatly simplify and standardize your enterprise IT service offerings, and why it’s important to design from the beginning with this goal in mind.
IT Complexity = Tremendous Burden
When describing cloud computing benefits, we often talk about improved business agility and cost savings. One of the most profound and impactful ways to achieve these benefits across the enterprise comes from the pursuit of IT standardization and simplification, which is an important cloud computing objective that deserves more attention.
Think about the hundreds or thousands of different IT technologies and processes that exist within an enterprise IT organization today. If you inventory just one enterprise data center, you’ll see scores of hardware vendors, platforms, and operating systems assembled in unique combinations to support a sprawling assortment of heterogeneous apps.
The time and cost to manage this complexity is tremendous, and the chaos it creates places a significant burden on those charged with keeping IT running smoothly. In addition to support, there are redundant costs and waste associated with building solutions on top of this complex ecosystem including different overlapping tools, platforms, and processes. That’s one reason why enterprise IT budgets tend to follow an "80/20 rule", where 80% is consumed in maintaining the status quo, and just 20% goes to new projects that directly add business value.