How to craft a cloud services catalog entry Otesanya David March 26, 2022

How to craft a cloud services catalog entry

How to craft a cloud services catalog entry

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As we slog into another year of the global pandemic, attention to cloud spending and provisioning is at an all-time high in the enterprise, requiring renewed attention to cloud procurement. Consequently, as part of a service desk or self-service cloud brokerage, the cloud services catalog grows in importance.

By design, a cloud service catalog should be tiered or hierarchical with well-crafted services catalog entries that include the essential technical and pricing information your stakeholders will need when buying a cloud service for their project.

Clarity and accuracy are key

A service catalog entry should be a “technical outcome” that includes all of the components and professional services that an internal or external service provider assembles for a customer. In other words, it should be much more than a discrete combination of items in a traditional bill of materials.

For example, a catalog entry for a virtual machine may describe the VM as an instance with a combination of vCPU, RAM, and storage, with a service level objective (SLO) of immediate provisioning and a service level agreement (SLA) of 99.95% uptime. A detailed catalog entry of the VM will include all of the compute, storage, networking hardware, and software assembled by engineers to create and deliver that service under those terms.

Writing a service catalog entry isn’t about being a copywriter like Don Draper or a senior cloud architect. Instead, it’s about recording technically accurate information and current pricing that come from collaboration between technology and business teams. Depending on the breadth of cloud services you offer, your catalog entries may span multiple cloud service providers (CSPs) and even add-on professional services and cloud training for your employees.

Take a close look at this wireframe example of a typical cloud services catalog entry:

Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.

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