The promised land
The Enterprise today has many challenges that the IT organisation is tasked to resolve. The business demands Speedier services, Lower costs, Increased reliability, Greater flexibility, Elastic scalability. It sounds like a job for some cloud services right?
The problem though is that these requests all conflict with the things that traditionally the IT organisation has held very dear to it; Security, Policies and Regulatory constraints, Management oversight, Service allocation and budgeting, Access management, Control, monitoring and Governance.
Put simply, the business and application development teams want to exploit the ‘promise’ of cloud enabled services and become an agile, empowered enterprise by acquiring IT services simply and instantly themselves - without getting the IT organisation involved - by ‘browsing’ through a catalogue of business ready services. But the IT organisation knows it must remain in control of the infrastructure, services and information systems that are used. Yin and Yang anyone?
Getting there quickly
Abiquo solutions seek to satisfy the needs of both the IT organisation and the application/business development teams of any enterprise that wants to optimize the way that IT builds, manages and provisions services for the business.
Abiquo integrates with a wide range of virtualisation and infrastructure technologies – all of the major hypervisors, storage solutions and network standards are considered and simply unified into a single, shared pool of physical computing resources controlled, allocated and managed by the IT organization.
Even if the organization does not immediately plan to move to lower cost solutions, the fact that they have the ability to do so materially improves their negotiating ability.
The Control the enterprise needs
Existing cloud infrastructures can be simply brought under Abiquo management to give the business the oversight it needs to remain in control of the enterprise and delegates management of virtualized enterprises for authorised users within appropriate, defined resource limits and automatically distributes workloads according to policy.
Improved Data Center Operations
Abiquo yields a significant reduction in the workload of the IT infrastructure organisation, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks, in addition to drastic improvement in utilisation, both through policy based workload management, and by the incentive for “customers” to decommission unused machines to release resources for their own re-use.
Internal customers will have dramatically reduced provisioning times for the services they need, increasing business performance and agility and make short term and “what-if” projects feasible. – And let’s not forget about reduced energy costs, cooling and space requirements.
Abiquo provides customers with an environment to develop autonomous virtual enterprises, limited only by the cloud resources each is permitted to consume. Virtual enterprise administrators manage their own users and roles, and sub-divide their allocated resources into virtual datacenters, each managed by any combination of users.
Frictionless Experiences
Abiquo’s unique vApp Canvas allows definition of complete applications, each consisting of anything from a single virtual machine, to a complex combination of firewalls, load balancers, servers, virtual networks and storage – all managed as a single unit, and deployable without the need to involve IT operations at any stage in the process.
Abiquo’s image library makes centrally managed VM images available to all virtual enterprises and datacenters as a service catalog, as well as managing private image instances and persistent image volumes.
Comprehensive role-based access control allows user functionality to be simplified and/or restricted as desired, giving just the right balance of empowerment versus complexity according to each user’s needs.
Future proof IT
Abiquo’s open integration approach and extensive API ensures that technology decisions made today don’t become roadblocks and headaches in the future. If another technology vendor offers a underlying technology or service provider changes their terms, Abiquo ensures that the business has the agility to migrate with as little effort as possible.
