Enterprise Cloud Management
Overview
Your enterprise has many challenges that your IT organization is tasked to resolve. In today’s rapidly changing circumstances, your business needs to be more agile than your competitors, delivering IT services to your users faster and at lower cost, yet with increased choice, greater flexibility and elastic scalability.
The challenge is that these demands all conflict with the things that the IT organisation is tasked with delivering; security and compliance; management oversight, service allocation and budgeting; access management, control, monitoring and governance. Put simply, your business and application development teams want to exploit enterprise cloud management by provisioning and managing IT services simply and instantly themselves – without getting your IT organisation involved for every task – as consumers of business ready enterprise cloud services.
With a suitable enterprise cloud management platform, your IT team ensures it remains in control of the infrastructure, services, technologies, information systems and standards that comply with IT policies.
The Flexible Enterprise Cloud
Abiquo’s technology agnostic approach to enterprise cloud management is crucial for delivering the business benefits your users expect.
Not only does this approach ensure that Abiquo can be integrated with your existing private cloud and public cloud infrastructure, it empowers you to evolve your enterprise cloud to become a true business enabler.
Enterprise Cloud Use Cases
A typical IT delivery workflow goes like this:
- User requests a set of virtual resources, filling in a form
- IT responds asking for more detail
- User provides more detail, asks when it will be delivered
- IT reviews the request, asks more questions
- User answers but is getting frustrated now and starts using free AWS resources
- IT puts the build into the work queue, which goes through change control
- Resources built
- User starts using it but leaves AWS resource (and the data which shouldn’t be there) just in case
- IT occasionally reviews resources to see if they’re unused and tries to reclaim them after a few months
So the outcome is that the business risks losing a competitive advantage, the user is upset, data is located out of IT governance and resources are potentially wasted.
With Abiquo as your enterprise cloud management platform, the process would go more like this:
- User identifies a need for resource, and logs into your Abiquo enterprise cloud management system.
- User builds new resource from a list of IT-approved templates or blueprints, or duplicates an existing set of resource, all in a few minutes, in whichever clouds the IT policy allows
- User sets up budget alerts, schedules services to be shut down based on budget and a date/time
- IT gets reports on utilization, bills, user activity
- Optionally, use Abiquo workflow to have IT approve certain resources – very large servers, certain cloud regions etc
Simpler, right? Users are happy, IT has more control and oversight, and the business is more agile.
The Abiquo Enterprise Cloud Edge
When you enable your enterprise cloud with Abiquo, whether creating a new service or onboarding all your existing cloud platforms (without any service interruption!), your IT service delivery can be entirely automated, from deploying virtual machines, creating and attaching storage volumes, through managing IP addresses, firewalls, load balancers and VLANs, Abiquo does it all for you, according to your defined business and operational policies to ensure absolute control of applications, services and resources available across your enterprise.
The Abiquo cloud management platform helps you deliver on the promises of enterprise cloud computing with improved agility, simplicity and self-service provisioning, but also recognises that you will have investments in existing processes, procedures and workflows. Abiquo’s flexibility means that it can integrate with your business workflow tools, to create a fully featured self service model which still delivers the business controls you need. As your cloud deployment matures the Abiquo configuration can easily be changed to integrate with your new processes. Support for DevOps is built in, with a comprehensive API which works for all infrastructure types.
Abiquo helps leverage complex hybrid cloud environments for competitive advantage, while simplifying workflow for cloud users. Get real business benefits by offering new features and functionalities that will help reach your company’s goals.
The Enterprise Cloud Challenge
Your organisation is probably already considering, or using, public cloud services from providers such as Amazon (AWS) and Azure (Microsoft). Your challenge is to control the usage and costs of public cloud across your business while maintaining the flexibility you want.
Abiquo helps you to adopt public cloud services in a structured way by placing policies, controls and processes around the access to and consumption of cloud resources, just as though they were part of your physical infrastructure. All the links to other systems that you build for your private clouds will still work when you extend your enterprise cloud to public cloud too!
A single pane of glass to manage all your clouds
The Abiquo enterprise cloud management platform provides the controls you need if you are:
- Seeking management and control over multiple clouds from one, easy to use interface.
- Concerned about “rogue” use of the public cloud that is not compliant with policy.
- Developing in-house applications that are suitable for public cloud infrastructure.
The Abiquo enterprise cloud platform provides you with a “single pane of glass” that puts you in control of your cloud platforms by :
- Simplifying the user experience by with a unified user interface, no matter what the underlying technology or service is
- Managing the access, consumption and security controls of the underlying technology or service
- Providing full data and access logging to satisfy governance and compliance reporting
- Ensuring the management of financial budgets across multiple public clouds
Future proof enterprise cloud management
Abiquo’s open integration approach and extensive integration API ensures that technology decisions made today don’t become roadblocks and headaches in the future.
If another technology vendor offers an underlying technology or Managed Service Provider changes their terms, Abiquo ensures that the business has the agility to migrate with as little effort as possible.
The Abiquo enterprise cloud platform provides you with a “single pane of glass” that puts you in control of your cloud platforms by :
- Simplifying the user experience by with a unified user interface, no matter what the underlying technology or service is
- Managing the access, consumption and security controls of the underlying technology or service
- Providing full data and access logging to satisfy governance and compliance reporting
- Ensuring the management of financial budgets across multiple public clouds