US Patent 9354983 Integrated it service provisioning and management

An integrated infrastructure technology (IT) service provisioning and management framework 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. Service applications are created by defining a set of interactions between 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 an agent. Based at least in part on the information received the agent, a service policy is defined to trigger a data transfer from the agent to the cached cloud server gateway. An off-premise backup policy is defined to enable the cached cloud server gateway to transfer data to a first primary cloud server of the one or more primary cloud servers.