Todate Abiquo has focused on integrating with a rich set of virtualization technologies that form the essential ‘building blocks’ of any cloud resource. We have developed Abiquo to be as agnostic as possible, ensuring that our customers do not have to worry about potential vendor lock-ins and they can build the cloud they want, out of the technology they have already acquired – today.
Abiquo Open Architecture – The Story So Far…
Abiquo Open Architecture:
The result is the most advanced Cloud Management platform on the market today, especially for those who are aiming to integrate and exploit multiple, disparate virtualization and cloud technologies from different vendors.
And we’ve been successful, this approach has appealed to many organisations – but we spotted a trend : almost all of the clouds created were for new, separate services – they were not based around existing technology, services and processes – Why?
Operational Minefields
In almost every environment we have encountered thus far, we have found several areas of ‘traditional IT management’ that prevent the customer from revolutionising their existing approach and processes in running their business.
Simply put there’s a lot more technology, policy, control and governance surrounding their existing business today that NO Cloud Management platform addresses.
Providing an automated approach to IT service delivery sounds great, but what does the business do with the existing rules? Throw them away? Very unlikely.
Operating a Cloud service requires more than IaaS
Let’s look at a few of the legacy issues that IT has had to learn how to deal with and control:
- Infrastructure Inventory and discovery
- Security Controls (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability)
- Change Control, Workflow and Business Process Management
- Virtual Machine optimisation/troubleshooting
- Image Management and Maintenance (including configuration, updates, patches etc.)
- Green IT
In most organisations, almost all of these challenges are handled by different legacy technologies, from different vendors, managed by separate teams and using specific management solutions that they have acquired. You can see why many businesses take a shortcut ; either by developing their new cloud service as a new function within the business, or by circumventing their internal IT entirely by acquiring public services in an effort to completely bypass the problem!
Building AND Operating a Cloud – Abiquo EverythinQ
Abiquo has already opened discussions with various technology vendors in each of the areas noted above, with a view towards integrating and extending the management functionality provided by each respective technology into the Abiquo platform. (and vis-versa)
Our objective is to ensure that we provide our customers with more than a fast and easy route to building a cloud from disparate resources, but to also to help them operate, optimise and use it every day, making it simpler for them to undertake the tasks they perform and ensure that they can interoperate that cloud with their existing processes, skills and technologies that they have already invested in.
We truly believe that the promises of efficiencies, flexibility and cost reduction offered by Cloud based services can be achieved and will revolutionise the way a business works – but we realise that we must first make the tasks of transitioning to and operating the cloud easier for them to undertake.
The Abiquo platform empowers customers to develop a flexible, controlled, agnostic cloud service that can fully automate the delivery of compute, storage and network configuration of applications and IT services to customers in seconds, without IT intervention.
For those customers who want to integrate their existing operational processes and technologies into a cloud offering, Abiquo offers the simplest and fastest route to undertaking that!
