Abiquo Presents Enterprise Cloud Management Best Practices at CIOsynergy Events

To help CIOs successfully adopt Cloud Computing across their global enterprises and resolve virtualization 1.0 issues, Abiquo’s CEO Pete Malcolm is presenting Enterprise Cloud Management Best Practices at two CIOsynergy events.

“We are clearly seeing an upswing in interest in private Cloud adoption,” said Pete Malcolm, Abiquo CEO. “But, CIOs still need a partner like Abiquo to help them successfully implement an integrated enterprise Cloud management solution that will work across their global enterprise, which is why we believe the CIOsynergy networking and learning forums are ideal next steps for any CIO who is ready to embrace enterprise Cloud Computing.”

“Given the high interest in Cloud Computing this year, we are pleased to have Abiquo present enterprise Cloud management best practices at our CIOsynergy events,” said Nepal Patel of CIOsynergy. “Global CIOs and IT professionals come to our CIOsynergy events for just this type of thought leadership insight.”

Abiquo Sees Four Indicators That CIOs Are Ready to Embrace Enterprise Cloud Computing

Abiquo, the leading enterprise Cloud management software provider, is seeing a clear, emerging trend that CIOs and senior IT professionals in Global 2000 firms are ready to embrace private or enterprise Cloud Computing strategically. Here are four key indicators:

1. Cloud Computing was selected as one of the highest priorities for spending within the next 6-18 months according to a survey conducted by CIOsynergy this month.
2. Gartner Cloud Services Report 2009-2014 says one of the biggest changes in the last year is CIOs interest in adopting Cloud Computing strategically.
3. The U.S. federal government’s CIO office, led by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, has established a new joint authorization board for Cloud Computing.
4. Next year promises to be a big one for private Cloud adoption, according to a 2010 IDC APEF client survey, where savvy CIOs will use the Cloud as an extension of their sourcing strategies and have a mix of public and private Clouds under the enterprise portfolio.

“One notable change versus one year ago in the Cloud Services Report is that CIOs and progressive IT leaders are embracing Cloud strategically,” said Gartner senior analyst Ben Pring. “The key next step is for companies to create an enterprise roadmap that outlines how they plan to leverage Cloud services.”

Abiquo featured as Innovator at VMworld 2010, event recap and photos

Abiquo was featured as an innovator at VMworld 2010.  For a post event recap and photos, go to /news-and-events/vmworld2010event.php?lang=en

VMworld 2010 was held on August 30-September 2, 2010 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. The event attracted a record number of more than 17,000 customers, partners, press and analysts, and 233 sponsors and exhibitors signifying a major shift in the IT industry towards Cloud Computing.

Abiquo was featured as one of the fifteen New Innovators in the VMworld 2010 Solutions Exchange and the complete Abiquo Enterprise Edition was demonstrated live all four days of the event. VMworld attendees were particularly interested in Abiquo’s virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion tool and the enterprise management console which fully integrates and cooperates with VMware tools like vSphere.

CIO Whitepaper ‘Creating and Implementing an Enterprise Cloud Strategy’

Cloud Computing is about the ability to share IT resources more efficiently. Thus, the core objective of IT, and specifically the CIO, should be to understand the value that this technology can bring to their enterprise or government agency.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework of understanding around the use of Cloud Computing technology, and suggest a process to create and implement an enterprise Cloud strategy for their organization. We will focus on the creation of a Cloud Computing strategy that defines a sound Cloud infrastructure management approach, and selection of the right enabling technology.

This paper is ideal for CIOs or anyone who wants to understand the systemic value of the Cloud Computing shift in IT, and how to drive more efficiency into their IT infrastructure over time. We’ll do this by walking through the process of creating a Cloud Computing strategic roadmap for their organization, or a plan that will ensure additional strategic IT efficiencies, using Cloud Computing as a strategic enabling technology.

This CIO white paper was written by David Linthicum, founder and CTO of Blue Mountain Labs and author of 13 books and the Cloudbook.net blog.

Key topics in this paper include:

• Executive Summary
• Cloud Computing Challenges Today
• Creating Your Vision for Cloud Computing
• Creating a Cloud Computing Roadmap
  • New strategies
  • New software
  • New business-driven policies
• Enterprise Deployment Strategies
• The Need for Cloud Infrastructure Management
  • Key enterprise requirements
• Leveraging Abiquo for Cloud Management

To download this paper, click here: Creating and Implementing a Cloud Strategy

Abiquo Identifies Top 5 Virtualization Issues and their Implications

After extensive research among its more than 20,000 customers, open source users and prospects, Abiquo identified the top five issues facing enterprises today:

1. Security and Compliance
2. IT Organization Overload
3. Lack of Visibility into Virtual Environments
4. Unrealized Utilization Improvements
5. Vendor Lock-in

Implications of Top Five Virtualization Issues

Companies are moving to virtualization to increase server utilization rates and save money. According to research carried out by IDC in 2009, there was a 16% increase in server virtualization, and this year IDC claims that companies have even begun to adopt a “virtualization first” mentality because IT departments are keen to save money.
Yet Abiquo’s research clearly shows that the five major issues are either preventing companies from virtualizing more of their environments, or are preventing companies from realizing cost savings from their current virtualized environments.

Limiting Virtualization Adoption

Abiquo found that security and compliance concerns were the number one reason why many enterprises limited their virtualization efforts to non-production development and test systems only. For example, while virtual machine portability is highly beneficial from a resilience standpoint, for many organizations it creates a security and compliance nightmare. Effective data separation is difficult, not only to ensure, but also to provably track. Some enterprises attempt to mitigate the problem by creating separate “virtualized islands”, each running on different physical hardware, but this only reduces utilization, and presents a barrier to Cloud adoption.

The provisioning of virtual machines and storage, carried out by IT personnel, also leads to increased security and compliance risks since, unlike in the physical world where applications are both isolated and stay put, in virtualized environments IT must correctly (and repeatedly) determine the correct location in relation to other virtual systems. In short, they must fully understand and act upon the security and compliance requirements each and every time. Since the task is complex and humans are fallible, errors are inevitable. Virtualized environments that offer automated load balancing and fail-over only make the problem worse.

Limiting Virtualization Savings

Abiquo discovered that 4 of the 5 top virtualization issues limited companies’ ability to realize cost savings. For example, in addition to the “virtualized islands” issue described above, utilization decisions made by humans, who determine at least the initial location of every virtual system, rarely if ever produce the most effective utilization plan. For best utilization, a complete re-evaluation of the entire virtualized environment is required every time a virtual system is provisioned, or re-started. IT personnel have neither the time, nor the tools to do this, especially if they are also considering security and compliance.

In most enterprises the IT provisioning team is generally entirely separate from the application team that runs the virtualized system. This disconnect can lead to inefficiency and increased cost. For example, many enterprises that adopt virtualization find that over time a large number of virtual systems have resources allocated, but are no longer being used. Either nobody bothered to tell the infrastructure team, or the desire to “keep it around in case I need it later” prevailed.

Vendor lock-in is a barrier to adoption (for example many US government departments are restricted from using single vendor solutions) which leads to artificially high pricing when using a captive vendor.

Solution to Virtualization Issues

Abiquo believes that most enterprises do not realize there is a viable solution to these issues. An enterprise cloud management solution such as the Abiquo Enterprise Edition provides a bridge between basic virtualization and fully Cloud enabled computing.  “By investing in a unified cloud management system, enterprises can truly realize the full benefits of virtualization”, said Pete Malcolm, Abiquo CEO. “Abiquo is the only solution that addresses all five of the top virtualization issues, dramatically improving utilization to realize cost savings, eliminating security and compliance concerns, substantially reducing the load on the IT organization, gaining visibility into virtual environments and eliminating vendor lock-in – all without any increase in risk.”

Learn more about the Abiquo Enterprise Edition and how it addresses the top 5 virtualization issues at abiquo.com.