Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise THE VALUE OF A SINGLE, INTEGRATED CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORM

2 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 2 How does your organization view the cloud? Do your IT and business managers have visibility into and governance over all cloud implementations? Can your users access cloud services with ease? Is the cloud of interest, but security and cost controls a concern? If your company could benefit from an integrated approach to provisioning, governing, and managing cloud services than you will enjoy reading this white paper. OVERVIEW Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses operate, with new on-demand and pay-as-you-go IT services. While the benefits of cloud computing are proving true, managing these services, controlling costs, and aligning cloud governance are challenges that enterprises must address. To effectively deal with this cloud chaos, organizations need a single cloud management platform that can enforce policies and seamlessly integrate into a hybrid cloud environment. WHAT IS A CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORM? A cloud management platform (CMP) is an integrated software suite used to provision, govern, and manage cloud computing services from one or more cloud providers. The CMP offers value through integrated, unified, and centralized cloud management functions that span multi-cloud, multi-vendor, and hybrid environments. While the extent of integrations and capabilities vary by provider, CMPs typically include support for selfservice cloud acquisition, tools to optimize and automate workflows, and reports to ensure that cloud policies, usage goals, and IT standards are met. The capabilities that are included in leading CMP platforms go beyond the native tools included as standard from most cloud providers. In the areas of Security, Provisioning, and Service Catalogs, a CMP can simplify the user experience. Instead of establishing separate accounts with multiple cloud service providers (CSPs), users simply login to the CMP portal, which authenticates them and

3 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 3 allows them controlled access to services from multiple CSPs. Typically, from within a self-service marketplace, users can view and order from a list or catalog of services that is personalized for them. Role-based access controls allow IT and business managers to govern cloud acquisition by individuals, department, project teams, and groups. Some CMPs also offer cost savings via pre-negotiated rates, as well as reductions in set-up time, using simplified out-of-the-box integrations with a range of on-premise and offpremise cloud services. CMPs can also increase efficiency by federating and provisioning public cloud services, private cloud infrastructure, and hybrid environments. CMPs integrate, consume, and autoextend a larger selection of cloud services for end users without requiring significant time investments from IT for support. CMPs can be powerful enablers of self-service provisioning for all your on-demand IT services. CMPs also provide the user with more operational control through visibility across all of an enterprise s disparate cloud services, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS-based offerings. The best CMPs offer an easy-to-use interface, in which business and IT users have a single portal to access key information including cloud costs, utilization, and consumption data across varied cloud computing environments. The aggregation of cost data supports financial governance and reporting on internal and external cloud usage. The centralization of all these components, plus the ability to auto-discover and ingest cloud services deployed outside of the management platform, can deliver simplified and effective Reporting, Billing, and Management. Centralized, unified, and aggregated reports benefit IT and business users, and enable chargebacks, billing of ITaaS, and realtime decision support. A viable Cloud Management Platform can make it less expensive, easier, safer, and more productive for companies to navigate, integrate, consume and extend cloud services, particularly when they span multiple, diverse cloud services providers. Daryl Plummer, Chief of Research, Cloud Computing, Gartner, Inc.

4 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 4 HOW DOES A CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORM BENEFIT THE ENTERPRISE? Perhaps the greatest impact an effective cloud management platform will have on an organization is enabling IT to improve its service levels to the business. Many of the complexities of cloud management can be automated and orchestrated in the background without any manual intervention. This gives IT the tools it needs to manage today s cloud-based business technologies while reducing the day-to-day time and tasks involved in cloud management. This frees IT staff to focus on matters that provide a larger impact to the business while also enabling accurate cloud costing analysis and return on investment (ROI) assessments. FIGURE 1 CLOUD COMPANIES SaaS PaaS IaaS PRIVATE CLOUD CMPs also provide direct benefits to the IT organization. With a CMP, users gain easy access to a complete range of services through a single storefront. This storefront (Figure 2) drives utilization of cloud services and promotes self-service ordering, provisioning, and workflow approvals. Reports allow IT managers to verify that cloud service SLAs are being met, and both IT and business users can identify services that are being underutilized. In a recent study, IT satisfaction scores before and twelve months after the deployment of CMPs revealed an average improvement of 20% in satisfaction ratings and a 17% average increase in cloud service adoption levels among IT organizations. Before cloud management platforms systems, organizations had ad hoc cloud implementations across the enterprise. Some had IT oversight, and all had separate and distinct reporting and management tools. IT governance required multiple interfaces there was no cohesive, centralized single-pane view. Fees varied from one department to the next depending on how well prices had been negotiated. Utilization rates and true cost were difficult to ascertain. IT governance was a manual, time intensive, and inefficient process.

5 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 5 Figure 2: Self-Service Marketplace A cloud management platform can help on all of those fronts. At a glance, the benefits a CMP can provide are: Cost Avoidance. Out-of-the-Box integrations can greatly reduce professional services and maintenance expenses associated with safe and secure cloud implementations. Effective Cloud Resource Management. Central visibility and comprehensive reports prevent over/under-provisioning, support improved ROI, and enable effective budgeting, chargebacks, and provisioning of ITaaS. Support of Business. Simplified cloud service acquisition optimizes the user experience, fuels improvements and business growth, and provides a platform for ensuring overall accountability for cloud service usage and expenditures. HOW DOES A CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORM WORK? Several underlying technology components are used within CMPs. At the core is the service catalog, which is typically a relational database that houses all the cloud-based services supplied through the brokering function within the CMP. The catalog provides users with cloud service options that have been approved and integrated into its platform. Users can input criteria such as software type, host operating systems, network specifications, storage specifications, and locations (whether private or public). The output will list the available service options along with corresponding costs.

6 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 6 Figure3: Integrated cloud management platform Governance Management (Privat, Public) Self-service Portal Reporting (Usage, Billing) A workflow component is required to orchestrate the ordering and approval of the selected services. These workflows utilize a messaging bus to direct commands to the appropriate location based on the request, service type, and/or budget available. The orchestration engine is the brain behind service brokering, and it funnels the appropriate commands to their correct destinations based on processes and logic. The next layer includes the cloud service provider adapters. Having a robust orchestration component does little good without the adapters needed to work with the growing number of cloud service providers. The adapter layer of the platform provides the provisioning and data extraction capabilities to and from cloud resources supplied by the cloud provider (both private and public).

7 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 7 Figure 4: Single Pane of Glass The CMP adapters receive a request for a cloud service(s) from the orchestration layer and instantiate the service using that CSP s supported formats and protocols. Instantiation starts services, and initiates notifications, management, and reporting on those spun-up services for a particular consumer or group. Adapters are key to CMP integrations with IT solutions, such as Single sign-on (SSO) and Cloud Automation (e.g. Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack). They also allow integration with monitoring solutions that automate provisioning based on utilization or capacity. The wrapper for all of these components is the interface. Think of the interface as an enterprise-wide storefront or marketplace that authenticates the user and provides a customized set of services from the service catalog for that user. The user can select a service or move a service from one provider to another. Each selection establishes the appropriate workflows, which then automate all the required steps behind the scenes. The interface shows the user what services they have instantiated and the current usage and billing for these services, and it serves as the operational view for utilization data and real-time reports.

8 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 8 Figure 5: Billing and Usage Reports For enterprises where cloud security and compliance are top concerns, it is important to know how a CMP supports encryption. The CMP s that provide encryption at the messaging layer allow data to move securely between an enterprise and cloud service providers. This also allows front-end cloud acquisition interfaces to employ authentication with group and role isolation so that only authorized users can see your infrastructure. However, across CSPs, there is a general lack of available standards. This means that CMPs have to customize their service adapters based on providers specific programming interfaces, which is a more complex, and time-consuming process. Similar to the way the travel industry has revolutionized how consumers buy travel services online, cloud management platforms use a similar self-directed methodology to transform the way enterprises consume public, private, and hybrid cloud services.

9 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 9 HOW TO SELECT AND IMPLEMENT CLOUD MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS? There is no rule-of-thumb that dictates when a business is ready, or needs to take the steps to implement a cloud service management platform. There are, however, key indicators that suggest when it is likely to be beneficial. Consider your answers to these questions: Do multiple departments / organizations within your company use cloud services? Do you have more than two providers of cloud services? Do multiple groups utilize private, public, or hybrid cloud services? Is your IT department overly burdened with instantiation and maintenance of cloud services? Do you need to allocate spend and direct chargebacks across multiple services? Do you desire to keep things decentralized but want to automate, optimize, and ensure governance? Do you want your users to have self-service provisioning capabilities? Each of these scenarios points to a need to consider CMPs. When choosing which CMP to use, both the IT department and responsible business units should be involved in the decision making process. Develop a list of current and future-state requirements to help narrow down the list of compatible service providers. Verify interoperability between the platform and your internal cloud infrastructure components, along with your service providers. And finally, evaluate the cloud management provider against these standards: Will a platform solution make cloud computing less expensive, easier, and/or safer? Will our business users and IT functions become more productive? Does the system offer advantages in terms of navigation/ease of use? Can my users select services based on a range of criteria such as service level guarantees, price points, geographic limitations, and performance? What are the integration offerings and how do they address my interoperability needs? Does the solution offer a range of services and flexibility to work with a variety of providers and service types (ITaaS)? Will the platform enable my IT department to function as a cloud services broker? Does the solution meet my organization s needs today, and is it likely to be adaptable and scalable to my evolving needs in the future?

10 Managing Cloud Computing Services in the Enterprise 10 OSTRATO CLOUDSM THE SINGLE INTEGRATED CLOUD MANAGEMENT PLATFORM Ostrato cloudsm is a cloud management platform that provides business units including DevOps, Finance, and IT exactly what they need to leverage the cloud in an expedited, yet safe and centrally managed way. By integrating private, public, and hybrid cloud services into a single platform, Ostrato helps organizations streamline and speed cloud adoption while ensuring that the cloud is utilized to the best advantage across multiple groups and instances in terms of cost, performance, features, functionality, and geographic location. Ostrato helps ensure that IT and business standards and goals for cloud computing are met, and that organizations are able to clearly measure ROI. For more information or to schedule a free trial please visit our website: