customization, delivering flexibility for end users within the constraints designed by IT departments.
Closed-loop compliance
Clouds are not islands in the data centre. Rather, a cloud should be a component of a broad array of infrastructure, from the physical to the virtual and even to the public cloud. It stands to reason, then, that clouds should be managed through the same rigorous approaches that have grown from years of investment and experience in IT management. The CMDB should track cloud services just as it tracks other items. And perhaps most important, change management and compliance should be applied just as thoroughly in the cloud as on other systems.
become more complex), the self-service portal can continue to address the needs of research and development, software development, application deployment, and even internal business customers.
Service catalogue
Behind the self-service portal should lie a service catalogue, which acts as a listing of the services and options available to users of the cloud. Ranging from resource profiles to operating systems to full listings of available applications, this catalogue controls what appears to each user in the self-service portal. Behind the scenes, the service catalogue also captures the intelligence and processes to be followed to implement the operating systems and applications in an automated fashion.
The service catalogue is a major source of flexibility and control in the cloud environment. The many combinations available from the service catalogue represent a diverse and vast set of configurations to help meet a user’s specific needs. But the constraints, role-based access, and policies reflected in the catalogue enable the cloud administrators to maintain tight control over the cloud environment and the services deployed. An ideal service catalogue should not only offer new service instances that users can select from the portal; it should also represent the authoritative record of the functional components that make up that service, from servers and storage to OS and application binaries and licenses to the IT resources needed to maintain the service in production. For example, as IT staff install new servers and storage and publish those resources to the catalogue, they are automatically factored into the model of capabilities that may be made available to users.
Flexible provisioning To help maximize the flexibility of the service stacks for users, a cloud management solution should support a versatile underlying provisioning capability. Traditional virtualization provisioning is image based, requiring IT staff to either restrictively standardise on a very small set of images or, alternatively, manage a library of hundreds of unique images. A recommended approach to this is one of controlled
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As dynamic as the cloud environment is, change management can be challenging for IT administrators. Inventories and lists are difficult to maintain in a world of shifting workloads and newly provisioned services. Closed-loop compliance— for both configuration and regulatory reasons—helps ensure that a change is identified, a remediation is enacted, and the result is confirmed.
Decommissioning
Cloud services are designed to be transient. Easy to request and provision, they can be instantiated for hours or days and then retired, freeing the resources for the next user. The retirement of resources is a critical part of that cycle.
Organisations should look for a solution that automates this step on a calendar and helps ensure that cloud services aren’t simply neglected in the environment, taking up costly resources and delivering no value. Instead, on a schedule, cloud users are prompted to decommission or extend their services, helping ensure that the life cycle continues seamlessly.
Hybrid cloud operations One of the primary values of the cloud architecture is its elasticity and scalability, even beyond the organisation’s data centre. Public cloud service providers are proliferating, offering an array of options for enterprises looking to extend the scale of their IT operations—whether temporarily or permanently—with external resources. Critical to using those resources, however, is a management model that can integrate the services seamlessly into the organisation’s environment. An ideal solution should enable IT departments to take advantage of public cloud resources, like those of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, from within the same self-service portal as the private cloud resources. Regardless of whether the ultimate destination of their cloud service is made clear to end users, or whether provisioning decisions are automated on the back end, this capability enables great flexibility for enterprises seeking to efficiently meet demand.
Ultimately, with the right solution in place, an enterprise cloud can help to significantly lower administrative burdens, reduce costs, and ultimately deliver the greatest value to the business: excellent customer satisfaction.
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