It’s generally acknowledged that Amazon created the first public cloud. With it came the ability to plug into a seemingly infinite resource pool of storage, processing power and networks. Google and Apple have followed suit along with a raft of other providers and whilst their offerings are portrayed as different, the premise is  very much the same – providing either storage, or compute resources.

From a cost and time-to-market perspective, public cloud is very tempting – you can be up and running with most providers quickly and cheaply often with a short-term or temporary commitment to the service.

It’s no wonder then that enterprises who have development and test environments want instant access to services, storage and compute power – inevitably, from their perspective – it’s the IT department who become the bottle-neck in the approvals and provisioning process.

Therefore, devops workgroups will look to the outside world and buy a service (usually unauthorised) from Amazon Web Services or the like?

The IT organisation cannot allow this to happen for a number of reasons:

• Enterprises cannot guarantee compliance/regulatory needs are met
• There are few or no user management controls
• Service is not bespoke or sufficiently tailored to meet the demands of the business
• Inadequate levels of support and SLAs for the enterprise (DIY, FAQs and wikis)
• Security and availability not suitable for the enterprise
• Localised and different data privacy laws
• No simple migration to and from different infrastructure offerings

But all is not lost – Abiquo enables enterprises to satisfy the needs of their internal customers and the IT organisation at the same time – and provide them with a controlled, unified platform that allows them to access a self service catalogue of IT approved and tested solutions immediately ‘off the shelf’ and prevents them looking outside the business for that level of service, agility and time to market.

Develop an easy to understand catalogue of approved IT services and applications

Moreso, Abiquo enables them to leverage their public and private clouds in a single management console where they can maintain control and quality within defined costs, stay compliant and exceed governance requirements WHILST meeting the demands of their service/business development teams.