Integrated it service provisioning and management

A method of operation within an integrated infrastructure technology (IT) service provisioning and management framework that includes, as framework components, a cloud-based management portal, one or more primary cloud servers, an on-premise cached cloud server gateway appliance, and one or more agents installed on respective on-premise computing devices, the method comprising:

• creating one or more service applications by defining a set of interactions between two or more of the framework components, including defining a set of service policies and corresponding interactions from the cloud-based management portal wherein at least one of the service policies defines a real-time request for information from the one or more agents;
• receiving the information from the one or more agents;
• based at least in part on the information received from the one or more agents, defining a service policy that triggers implementing any one or more service policies of the set to trigger a data transfer from the one or more agents to the cached cloud server gateway;
• and
• defining an off-premise backup policy to enable the cached cloud server gateway to transfer data to a first primary cloud server of the one or more primary cloud servers.