Governance and Efficiency for Compliance and the CFO
Integral to the Abiquo solution is fully automated business policy, which is unfailingly applied each and every time a virtual asset is provisioned by anyone in the organization. Business policy ensures that security, governance, and operational efficiency goals are consistently met, mitigating the risk of human error, and reducing cost.
Data and Application Security
Business policy provides for full control over where each operational unit can place data or run applications. For example, a policy rule applied to a team running sensitive business applications can limit operation to data centers actually owned by the organization, thereby eliminating public clouds and MSP hosted hardware as potential locations for those applications.
Conversely, a team running non-sensitive applications, such as public web servers, may be eligible to use public clouds and/or MSP hosted hardware, or could even have those locations designated as preferred to minimize cost.
Governance and Compliance
Complex governance and compliance rules are a reality for many enterprise organizations, especially those with international operations. Examples include information boundaries, whereby the data and applications of two different groups must not be allowed to co-exist on the same physical device, in the same rack, or even in the same datacenter - for example the Research and Investment Banking operations of a financial services organization.
Data boundaries, such as those impose by the European Union, prohibit the transmission of data beyond a country boundary – including, for example, an individual’s HR records. Therefore, the UK HR team must be limited to using only UK located data centers.
Abiquo business policy allows such rules to be set with ease, ensuring that relevant governance and compliance rules are automatically adhered to across the organization as necessary.
Optimizing ROI
Like virtualization before it, cost savings are an essential premise of the cloud, yet the vast majority of virtualized environments fail to achieve the significant utilization improvements promised, and are frequently more expensive to run than their physical counterparts.
Conversely, with some applications, time is of the essence - with higher performance leading to increased top line revenues, or greater cost savings. Here performance outweighs increased utilization.
With Abiquo, utilization and load balancing goals are set under business policy, according to the specific needs of relevant applications. Abiquo allows hardware to be reserved for particular applications, with different load balancing and/or utilization policies applied accordingly.
Behavior Changing
Many of the inefficiencies of existing virtualized environments result from natural human responses. For example, if the time taken to provision resources is great, the natural tendency is to request more resources than are actually needed to avoid delays in the future. Similarly, when resource provisioning is slow, the natural tendency is to hold on to resource when projects are complete. Such behaviour dramatically increases resource allocation/consumption.
By empowering users to provision and de-provision at will, by informing them of the costs associated with their provisioning actions, and by setting resource limits, organizations can effect significant behaviour change, directly improving efficiency and lowering cost.
Energy Saving and Cost Control
Energy saving policy allows idle physical hardware to be powered off until it is needed to meet the application load, when it is automatically powered up. The policy can also be configured to always provide a level of spare on-line capacity to avoid power-up delays in fast moving environments. Such power saving also lowers cooling requirements, as much as doubling the energy saved. With more advanced hardware, such as a managed blade chassis, power saving is offered down to the individual blade level, which can automatically lower ventilation requirements.
In addition to maximizing utilization, and energy saving, Abiquo policy encourages cost control by application groups, for example by identifying the cost associated with deploying a particular group of virtual assets before the decision is made to deploy. This information encourages application teams to limit resource usage to the minimum actually required.
Similarly, by placing resource consumption limits on each group, application teams are encouraged to re-use redundant resources. This is in sharp contrast to traditional virtualized environments where the time and effort required to provision resources often encourages application teams to retain them after they become redundant, in anticipation of re-using them at later date. This highly inefficient, and thus costly, practise is widespread in most enterprise organizations.
