Gartner report on cloud360 cloud management platform
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Cognizant's Cloud360 is a robust management platform designed to facilitate seamless and efficient management of diverse cloud environments, enhancing enterprise IT services and operational agility. It features user-friendly automation, policy-driven governance, and a self-service portal, enabling on-demand provisioning, cost control, and better compliance. With its ability to integrate across various infrastructures, Cloud360 empowers businesses to optimize resource usage, reduce costs, and improve application delivery speed.
Gartner report on cloud360 cloud management platform
- 1. 1 Management Platform for Disparate Cloud Ecosystem Empowering Enterprises for Seamless and Expenditious Use of Virtual Resources Issue 1 2 A Robust Platform for Seamless and Expeditious Management of Disparate Cloud Ecosystem! 10 How to Build an Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture 15 About Cognizant Featuring research from
- 2. 2 A Robust Platform for Seamless and Expeditious Management of Disparate Cloud Ecosystem! Cloud360 Overview across industry-leading private and public Cognizant’s Cloud360 is an innovative platform clouds. Cloud360 enables easy deployment that empowers enterprises to embrace cloud- and management of applications across cloud enabled environments with industry-leading environments so that users benefit from self- platforms, thus enhancing their IT services while service on-demand access to the infrastructure and improving business agility and operational IT leaders benefit from better compliance, greater efficiency. Cloud360 leverages private or transparency, and operational governance. public environments to cost-effectively Cloud360 prepares cloud environments for the manage applications, deliver IT services, ensure future by offering a seamless service management enterprise compliance and governance, and more layer between applications and infrastructure for importantly, protect existing IT investments. better governance, business agility, operational Enterprises can gain the combined benefits of a efficiency, and integration across the enterprise. powerful cloud infrastructure with a robust cloud Being a technology-independent platform, it management service. can orchestrate workloads across multiple cloud Cloud Management Platform for Service and platforms, hypervisors, and operating systems. Operations Management Cloud360 has successfully implemented cloud services for access management, service Delivered along with services, Cloud360 enables management, and service optimization tiers for enterprises to transform existing IT environments enterprises. to realize cloud business benefits, integrate with other eco-system components, and manage FIGURE 1 Cloud360 Service Management & Operations Source: Cognizant
- 3. 3 Customers get key benefits of on-demand Automation and Governance application roll-outs, automated deployments, Cloud360 enables users to define complex auto-remediation of environment issues, SLA- automation policies using simple, intuitive English- driven application management, and efficient like language. These policies offer auto-healing of consumption metering. This helps them to adapt environmental issues, ability to schedule tasks and better to changing business needs and to reach control cost. This Cloud Automation Language markets faster. (CAL) provides users the much-needed flexibility to create policies and gain a greater control of their Cloud360 Offerings @ Work environments. Easy to adopt and customize, it can Cloud360 has successfully completed numerous be quickly implemented across cloud operations engagements where enterprises have significantly for virtual entities related to applications, reduced costs by deploying Cloud environments. infrastructure, and monitoring. The following are some business scenarios where Cloud360 can be put to work. For example, a manager wants to define a policy to notify of the top 5 users with highest burn rate and On-demand and Self-service IT prevent any further provisioning requests, when the Cloud360 enhances the business agility and consumption metering in last 24 hours goes over operational efficiency of IT by enabling on- 50% of the previous 30-day consumption average. demand provisioning, while enforcing compliance. The policy using CAL is simply defined as follows: Enterprises can scale in or scale out their resources in the cloud environment based on their needs If within minutes. Cloud360, with its application Consumption metering (“Compute Date” > profiles and instance profiles, ensures a smooth -24h AND Usage (“Compute Date” = -30d) > and rapid deployment of application environments. 50) Users can perform ‘one-click’ deployment of application environments just in time across Do industry-leading platforms through the self-service portal, making IT simple and productive. Notify the Owner (Usage (Top 5)) Restrict any provisioning operation FIGURE 2 Business Use Cases for Cloud360 Source: Cognizant
- 4. 4 Additionally, Cloud360 brings in the necessary Access Management Tier standardization of cloud resources by using Cloud360’s self-service portal empowers users instance profiles and application profiles, thus with the ability to provision resources on demand enabling simpler management of cloud resources and the dashboard helps them to monitor the while ensuring appropriate governance. status of cloud resources and requests or tasks. With the Self Service Web Portal, Command Line Analytics and Optimization Interface (CLI), and Application Programming Cloud360 further enhances the pay-per-use benefit Interface (API), the product is highly configurable of a cloud by offering consumption metering and and can be integrated with third-party and analytics on resource usage and activity. Visibility proprietary software tools and applications. The into cost of running applications, compute open, extensible architecture of the product allows instances, and storage can be determined to users to integrate and work with many products drive better utilization, allocation of resources, and tools that the enterprises already possess. and IT budgets. Businesses can track the cost of Cloud360 supports role-based authentication. It deploying and maintaining business services/ enables enterprises to create customized roles applications through the Cloud360 dashboard, and define permissions and access rights for thus empowering them to make better business performing various operations in the cloud. decisions. Service Management Tier Monitoring and Service Level Management Cloud360 offers a seamless service management Cloud360 offers a zero-touch monitoring and layer between applications and infrastructure, auto-remediation of the application environment, helping enterprises achieve business agility, thus ensuring high availability and application operational efficiency, better IT governance, and SLA adherence. Applications, associated services, tighter integration of components across the OS resources, and hypervisors can be monitored. enterprise from applications and platforms. A Pre-defined application monitoring profiles can standardized service catalog offerings through be used as is or can be customized and applied application profiles and instance profiles ensures on instances with a single click, to simplify smooth one-click deployment of application monitoring complexities and ensure compliance. environments without compromising on the governance policies. Coupled with Cognizant’s Integrated Storage Management Managed Services, Cloud360 continuously Cloud360 offers intelligent storage management monitors the application environment and features for provisioning and managing storage manages the cloud based on the business metrics environment, such as profile-driven storage, alerts and baseline SLA to ensure high availability. Users on performance issues, and storage shortages. With can customize different monitoring profiles and Cloud360, users can schedule backups, monitor policies for tracking the performance of cloud the storage environment for usage, performance, resources and automating remedial measures. and availability and generate reports as required. Cloud360 also provides greater visibility into the These capabilities boost efficiency by automating provider billing, consumption of cloud resources, manual processes and simplifying administration and show-back costs for every group and tasks. deployment level. Business analytics and reporting empowers management for better resource A Robust Cloud Management Platform allocation, cost control, and decision-making. Cloud360’s key capabilities, such as policy- driven automation, integration with existing IT Service Optimization Tier environment, and right sizing of the infrastructure Cloud360 supports multiple systems (hypervisor, for application elasticity, makes it a robust Cloud OS, infrastructure, and cloud platforms) to Management Platform for implementing business- protect existing investments by the client and critical application on the cloud. Cloud360 create a “technology independent” platform that provides comprehensive services across the orchestrates workloads across cloud solutions. It following tiers: integrates consulting, professional, and IT services to ensure correct assessment and sufficient
- 5. 5 customization. It also offers modules, such as teams. These teams often work in silos and have SLA-driven IT management, Consumption different processes, policies, compliances, and Metering, Policy-driven Governance, and User request processing time. Coordinating with all of Management, that goes beyond technical cloud them for setting up environments becomes a time- management. Cloud360 enables users to define consuming activity and results in loss of business complex provisioning and automation policies, opportunities. using simple, intuitive English-like language, for optimizing provisioning workflows, enabling Cloud360 provides a unified IT service, thus saving auto-remediation of environments, and automating the user’s efforts to deal with disparate teams and cloud management. Intelligent Placement Policies also ensuring better compliance and governance can be customized to provision and backup within enterprises. It enables the users to get a instances at the best possible location and ensure single orchestrated view of different resources with compliance. a clear visibility of the entire application stack. It conducts end-to-end orchestration of application Addressing Traditional IT Problems environment and reduces the provisioning time Cloud360 not only eliminates the challenges faced from weeks to minutes. in the traditional IT setups but also future-proofs the cloud environments against the challenges Case study: A Top 10 global Pharmaceutical emerging due to technological advancements and major wanted to deploy ‘Development and Test changing demands. instances’ for their Agile Research environments. Managing vast underutilized system resources Breaking the Silos for Application-level View and a mix of environments, high administrative Traditional IT setups have separate management costs to provision were some of the major or operations layers for each type of application, challenges. Cloud360 enabled faster deployments platform, operating system, hardware and storage. of applications by providing on-demand, self- For provisioning an environment, business users service provisioning, and management of have to approach and coordinate with different application development, and test environments. FIGURE 3 IT as a Service by Cloud360 Source: Cognizant
- 6. 6 With Cloud360, the client experienced increased One-click provisioning is one of the core utilization of computing resources and reduced abilities that Cloud360 provides, to help users management costs. in provisioning compute instances on demand. Cloud360 enables businesses to scale up or scale Automated Deployments to Eliminate Errors down their resources in the cloud environment in a Deploying development, test, or production matter of minutes whenever required. Users do not environments manually involves a high risk of have to spend a lot of time planning for purchasing human error. Incorrect or incomplete deployment new infrastructure and resource allocation. With of an environment or even manual changes Cloud360, they can provision environments just done afterwards can greatly affect the sanity of in time and lower their TCO and increase their environments and its resources. Lack of standard business agility. configurations and policies can cost enterprises valuable time and resources. Case study: A leading U.K. university wanted to roll out an application on cloud for an estimated Cloud360, with its application profiles and 200 users. However, in the first eight weeks, they instance profiles, ensures a smooth and rapid received 12,000 paid users for their application. deployment of application environments. These Scaling the environment, meant to handle 200 pre-defined, customizable profiles enable one- users, to 12,000 users in a very short time was click deployment of environments, thus saving achieved successfully using Cloud360, with no time and improving speed to market. Cloud360 people involvement and no compromise on the brings in standardization of processes and page load SLAs. workflows through its automation, provisioning, and monitoring policies, thereby reducing the Auto-remediation for High Availability possibilities of manual error. Traditional IT setups require dedicated operations and maintenance teams to ensure that all Case study: One of the Top 5 Internet search resources in development or test environments firm required Cloud360 team to deliver a public such as servers, instances, and networks work cloud-based advertising services platform in only smoothly. Such people-based infrastructure six weeks, despite a lack of accurate application management incurs high costs for businesses. benchmarking or process definitions for going into the engagement. The Cloud360 team led Cloud360 brings in monitoring and auto- with a flexible architecture design that allowed remediation of the application environment, thus application development, testing, and proof-of- ensuring high availability. Cloud Automation concept on the cloud, monitoring of every failure Language (CAL), an intuitive policy-defining point, including threads and concurrency against English-like language, built by Cloud360, provides critical response parameters. The platform has a users the flexibility to customize automation, business SLA of 180 millisecond response time per provisioning, and monitoring policies as per their ad request with automated deployment of Web requirements. It brings in standardization of instances to handle the usage. processes and workflows through these policies. Cloud360 provides application awareness for On-Demand Provisioning for Faster Time-to- transient, scalable, elastic, long-tailed, and market HPC workloads along with managed services. As businesses expand or new projects are planned, It eliminates the people and process errors and the need for acquiring new infrastructure arises failures that cause more than 40% of all mission- and with that follows an entire gamut of activities, critical IT service outages. such as identifying the latest infrastructure, comparing costs, planning the capital expenditure Case study: A leading Engineering Design budget, analyzing the requirement, and capacity Company, suffered from lack of insight into utilization for all phases of the project, and application availability. Performance of services acquiring the infrastructure accordingly. This and application scalability was questionable for planning also involves the cost of maintenance its P2P SaaS Aggregator for Industry and Social and overheads incurred in periods of low demand. Resources. Cloud360 provided SaaS enablement, This lengthy process eventually delays the business growth, and zero-notice to onboard new application roll-outs. users with increased application visibility and
- 7. 7 support for the entire application stack Through Cloud360’s monitoring policies and along with SLA-based services. profiles, users can set threshold limits for various parameters responsible for the performance of Consumption Metering for Cost Control applications, instances, OS, and networks. If any Business users often do not have control of these cross the limits set, automatic triggers over their own infrastructure. Resources are created to auto-heal the environments and scaled up during peak development periods stabilize them in very less time. Configurable remain underutilized for most part of the Intelligent Placement Policies can be created to year. As businesses expand, it becomes provision instances and store and backup data in difficult to track the utilization of resources. the best possible geographical locations. This level Managers lack visibility of capacity of automation facilitates proper disaster recovery planning resulting in locking of capital in without much loss of productivity. underutilized resources. Delivering Enterprise IT Services with Cloud360 Self-Service Portal Dashboard Governance and Compliance offers a clear visibility of the application Cloud360 empowers users by delivering IT services stack and allocation of resources in the on demand. Cloud360 future-proofs the clouds, cloud to the managers. Its flexible and improve business agility by 20X, and reduce configurable policy framework allows them costs of operations by 35%. The following unique to set cost and resource consumption limits services offered by Cloud360 equip enterprises for application deployments, locations, users to achieve greater business agility and improved groups, or departments. With analytics and operational efficiencies. reporting, they can view the utilization trend of resources such as memory, CPU, storage, Services for improving Business Agility and network and control their consumption • One-click and Zero-touch provisioning to across the various environments shorten the time-to-market and application accordingly. provisioning from weeks to minutes Case study: A leading U.S. insurance • Self-service portal, Web Services API, and CLI major was evaluating options for hosting for a “do-it yourself” rich user experience its development and test environments on a public cloud environment, but with • Instance Profiles and Application profiles for consistency across the environments and standardizing and simplifying automation of tracking the consumptions of resources application deployments across business units. Cloud360 monitored the consumption across the various • Plug-ins and Integration for seamless business environments, suggested an optimized integration to retain previous IT investments usage scenario and eventually reduced and integrate existing tools with cloud the provisioning timelines from months to minutes with transparency on the usage Services for improving Operational Efficiency metrics. • Policies and Flex-ops to enforce business rules for cost, control, and operations in cloud Automated Disaster Recovery As traditional IT infrastructure is located at • Application Awareness for holistic management one location, protecting data and recovering of environments where the business needs it in case of any disaster becomes tricky. drive application sizing on the fly The time taken to fix issues and get a down environment up and running again • Consumption Metering and Chargebacks for is very high. The environment downtime accountability can continue for hours, thus affecting productivity and SLAs. • Analytics and Right sizing enabling optimizations for higher utilization and lower costs, hour by hour
- 8. 8 Cloud360 supports multiple industry leading resources consumption, capacity right sizing and platforms with off-the-shelf defaults and plug- optimization. ins for rapid application deployment. It manages application resources across these platforms in Conclusion an integrative and cohesive manner. Users can As enterprises are making swift strides in cloud switch between different clouds, add, or remove adoption to quickly respond to business demands clouds, and change platforms smoothly for holistic and market opportunities with the need of a cost- cloud management. Cloud360 supports all major effective strategy, Cloud360 presents a viable operating systems, such as Linux, Windows, and proposition through its accelerated deployment AIX, and can be accessed using popular browsers and flexible management of resources without and devices. vendor lock-in. Its key capabilities including Service Automation, Policy based orchestration, Cognizant Cloud360 Approach On-Demand self-service and Application Cloud360 provides an end-to-end cloud migration Awareness brings the greatest benefits to the and management service with its Transform, customers in both Business Agility as well as Integrate, and Manage approach. The Cloud360 Operational Efficiency. Combining this with its team conducts a thorough assessment of underlying technology neutral approach and the existing infrastructure, compares cloud support for hybrid cloud allows for maximum alternatives, creates baseline for applications, flexibility and reduces significant risk to the and performs migration analysis to help transform customers in deploying their cloud solutions. the customer’s requirement in to a strong cloud Cloud360 has successfully redefined the way top strategy. It seamlessly integrates Cloud360 enterprises across industries, such as life sciences, platform with the customer’s existing IT set-up and software development, engineering, airline, luxury enables on-demand provisioning of infrastructure apparels, online search, media and academics and applications. With its global delivery adopt and operate in the cloud. With on-demand network, it manages the cloud’s day-to-day provisioning, customizable automation policies operations including remote monitoring, tracking and a unified way to manage multiple cloud FIGURE 4 Cloud360 Approach Source: Cognizant
- 9. 9 platforms, Cloud360 provides enterprises a clear to the dynamic business environmental shifts. visibility and control of their cloud environments, Cloud360 offers enterprises the combined benefits thus increasing operational efficiency and lowering of a powerful cloud infrastructure with robust expenditures. cloud managed services, thus improving business agility by 20X and reducing costs by 35%. With With Cognizant’s deep experience in SLA-driven comprehensive end-to-end cloud enablement and management and monitoring, Cloud360 helps management services, Cloud360 becomes the enterprises of all sizes to deliver higher application ideal partner for enterprises planning operations availability to its customers 365 days and 24 in the cloud. Cloud360 is committed to ensure a hours a day. With the rapidly changing market of smooth transformational journey of enterprises to cloud service providers and Cloud360’s periodic the cloud. feature updates, enterprises find it easier to adapt Source: Cognizant
- 10. 10 From the Gartner Files: How to Build an Enterprise Cloud Service Architecture Fully architected enterprise private or hybrid • Choose a cloud management platform cloud offerings and the associated management (CMP) that enables management of hybrid functionality should consist of five logically resources and services, those operating both separated layers. A cloud service should have internally and externally. independent layers that maximize deployment flexibility, while enabling multivendor substitution • Not all cloud deployment scenarios will opportunities. require the complete “stack” of capabilities, but for mission-critical production clouds, Overview all layers should be present for at least a Here, we define the logical architecture of an minimum set of functionality. enterprise cloud service and its management. We would expect to find five layers in a complete • Build cloud services with real-time cloud service solution, but acknowledge that there infrastructure (RTI) architectures where there could be wide variations in typical deployments. is a need for dynamic service optimization. Gartner defines a cloud management platform as • Start your hybrid cloud journey by assessing the upper layers of the cloud solution. requirements for what needs to be Key Findings processed internally and what services can be processed on the outside. This will help • An enterprise cloud service architecture has five enable policy-based service delivery. functionality tiers: access management, service management, service optimization, resource What You Need to Know management and the underlying resource tier. Private and hybrid cloud services will require • Ideally, a cloud service’s layers should be a cultural and political change inside the IT logically independent of each other, they organization to make the role of operations more should maximize deployment flexibility proactive. This will require predefined planning, and they should enable the potential for policies, service levels and automated actions multivendor substitution. to take on the runtime environment, as opposed to the manual initiation of scripts or workflows. • Cloud services may have reduced requirements The application of the concept of “running IT for a service management tier — for example, like a business” will become mandatory in this in nonproduction, where fewer formal IT environment, because IT organizations will have management processes are generally applied. to learn and refine such areas as service catalog, capacity management, financial management • Enterprises are likely to end up with many and, more generally, service orientation. This will sets of cloud resources spread across internal require new skills and transformation. Ideally, and external resources. Unless they enable the architecture of a cloud service will not be the shifting of resources, resource-sharing monolithic (or tightly integrated) to enable more efficiency could be hampered. IT organizational flexibility and choice. However, selecting your components means that the Recommendations IT organization must become its own system integrator (SI). • Ideally, you should assess vendor cloud solution claims against the five components Alternatively, many IT organizations will choose independently, but realize that vendors more functionality from fewer vendors to reduce will want a greater proportion of your the SI effort. We recommend starting with a architecture, which will increase lock-in and cloud computing strategy, so that you know how stickiness. you want to operate your IT business model.
- 11. 11 For educating yourself on cloud computing, we an expanding service portfolio, enable broad recommend that you start small, with a limited governance and maximize the sharing of span of control, but build a private cloud and infrastructure resources. This means using fewer consider RTI architectures for expandability — compute/storage resource pools and using more more services, broader governance and more intelligent policies to direct the placement of shared resources. That way, when you put the services onto the resources and to optimize them. strategy together with what you’ve learned from In a hybrid cloud model, IT organizations can starting small, you should be able to gradually manage service delivery cohesively across internal develop your new cloud service architecture and and external pools of resources. its management, rather than taking a big-bang approach. The fewer the overall number of pools, the more likely each can be optimized to meet Analysis overall policies and constraints. That being said, To deliver on the five defining attributes of business and political trade-offs will need to be cloud services (service-based, scalable and made regarding resource efficiency, which may elastic, shared, metered by use and Internet suboptimize it to optimize business value. technologies), a cloud service architecture has five tiers of integrating components (see Figure Access Management 1). Enterprises can use these requirements to A cloud service presents a service-based interface evaluate market solutions for private and hybrid to end customers in which the details such cloud services — infrastructure as a service (IaaS), as location and the underlying multitenant platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a infrastructure of the implementation are hidden service (SaaS) — and their management. Moreover, from them. In fact, it should be possible to change these requirements will aid in evaluating a CMP the underlying technical implementation without that can manage both internally and externally the user knowing it, as well as easily add new sourced services and resources based on policies. offerings to the interface itself. This interface A CMP must include the top three layers of Figure might be a self-service portal or it could be an API 1; however, it does not need to implement the (for software to access the service offerings). The resource tiers, because it could integrate with interface is bidirectional. the resource management layers and be a type of manager of managers. Subscriber management (including identity and access management) is the other main component Not all vendor offerings will adhere to this model. of the access management tier. This is the cloud Clients do not need to deploy this entire stack administrative interface and enables the definition for every scenario; some layers may be thin in of policy in terms of who can order what services, functionality or missing altogether. For example, as well as detailed implementation rules and test/development environments are likely to workflows for provisioning and operation. need less-sophisticated service management capabilities and may, in fact, delegate service Service Management management functions to the customer. However, Gartner expects the capabilities in the service Gartner believes that, to achieve the fullest degree management tier to see the greatest variability in of benefit, while minimizing risk for mission- cloud offerings, because different services require critical environments, a cloud service requires all different styles of management, and cloud services the capabilities shown in Figure 1. often delegate the service management to the customer buying them (especially in IaaS). Cloud Public cloud service providers typically provide offerings will be detailed in service catalogs, which one service, or a small number of services, on a are self-service, and may provide information for large scale. Enterprises interested in private cloud private cloud offerings, as well as approved public services usually have many standard, but smaller- cloud services. The service catalog must define scale, service offerings. This could lead to many specifically what is included and excluded from cloud silos in an enterprise, with less efficiency in the service offering to avoid confusion and mixed resource usage. We recommend that enterprises expectations. build as few silos as possible to accommodate
- 12. 12 FIGURE 5 Cloud360 Approach Source: Cognizant User-requested SLAs are defined at this level Although we recommend that they do so, a cloud and are used to architect the delivered service, service should, at a minimum, record and present including the management services. The service metered service usage, cost estimates or list management tier provides critical input into prices (based on the service levels requested) to the service optimization tier. Simple cloud influence end-user behavior regarding business services might not offer much in terms of service value versus cost of service. Thus, at a minimum, optimization outside of following policies on a cloud service should provide a form of cost the placement of services. A complex service transparency or showback. might require dynamic and continuous service optimization — an RTI that leverages a more Traditionally, service management has not functional service governor. determined where to run services, the level of resources to apply, and when to scale the Many IT organizations don’t charge back and resources up or down because legacy services were don’t present service pricing to their customers. static. However, in a more dynamic cloud service
- 13. 13 architecture, service management provides insight PaaS and SaaS). This could also be a separate into SLAs, service performance and root cause function. analysis, such that Tier 3 service optimization, can supply resources in an optimal way to meet SLAs. Many other important service management It does this through policies, and is executed by processes (and associated tools) are critical to the service optimization tier. service integrity, but reside on the outside of the cloud service. These include asset, incident, More fully featured offerings will provide service change and release management, as well as design tools, enabling cloud architects and business analytics. administrators the ability to design, connect and deploy service bundles onto the underlying virtual Service Optimization infrastructure via drag-and-drop operations (which The service optimization tier provides the runtime automatically create the service model). However, policy and optimization for the cloud service care should be taken to prevent the metadata through the service governor. It may be simply models from impeding IT organizations from using implemented, such as only for initial provisioning the management tools of their choosing. placement of a service. However, even this can get complicated, with multiple resource pools spread The service management tier includes: across internal and external data centers. The service governor would perform intelligent service • The service catalog, which displays available placement based on the policies and metadata, services to the user, ideally with pricing such as the location of the user, location of the information. data, mission-criticality of the service, capacity of the resource pool, or even the business unit • The service model, which describes the associated with the service. Ongoing optimization taxonomy of the service with associated may also be implemented through service policies. governor policies, to match resources with service levels to enable the lowest cost of service delivery. • Service-level management, which defines the service-level options the user can choose. Service governor-like functionality may exist at many levels in the runtime architecture. Given the • Service availability and performance dependencies between services and resources, management, which provide monitoring and service governors must work together such that correlation services and integration with the they don’t impede each other’s actions. broader availability and performance portfolio, if required. Contracted external service resource pools would be available for provisioning and optimization, • Service demand management, which analyzes based on established policies and through historical demand patterns as an input to the intelligence gleaned from the service management service optimization tier. Service capacity tier, particularly the service catalog and vendor/ management works hand-in-hand with demand contract management. Moreover, we envision management, comparing demand and supply the service optimization tier to enable real- of resources over time, and recommending time external service sourcing or brokering as capacity increases on hybrid cloud resources. well, through a set of predefined policies and integration. • Service configuration management, which under the direction of the service optimization This tier may also require a transformation function layer, executes configuration changes to enable migrating from external to internal dynamically, as required, to provision and services or vice versa. For example, application maintain the service. development may occur on public cloud resources, but then be brought in-house for production • Service financial management, which includes deployment. If the development environment license management, metering, chargeback, was based on a different infrastructure stack than billing and reporting. It may also include what is used internally, the service governor would vendor/contract management for contractual direct or orchestrate transformation services to relationships with third parties (e.g., IaaS,
- 14. 14 ensure it could migrate intact. Migration services Resource Tier are likely to require significant customization (to This level represents the shared pool of resources. account for variations in the underlying resources), It consists of resource “virtualizers” — hypervisors, and testing would still be required to ensure that partitions, storage area networks (SANs), etc. there are no incompatibilities as a result of the — as well as the physical infrastructure fabric migration. (servers, disk and network elements). Although it is technically not a requirement to have virtual Resource Management machines as part of the IaaS cloud service This tier includes the resource agent and implementation, it is through the resource sharing controller infrastructure necessary to interface and offered by this technology that we would normally orchestrate the actual physical and virtual resource expect to see it as a component of the cloud assignments pursuant to the SLAs and policies. architecture to maximize shareability and its Unlike the service management tier, there is no associated cost benefits. Higher-level virtualization level of abstraction shielding the administrator (at the application, database management system, from knowledge regarding the real infrastructure etc.) may also be deployed to enable dynamic that exists below. The CMP should enable real-time service optimization. updates of physical resources added or subtracted from the system to talk to the virtual and physical The available virtualization technologies are resources, so that it can shift resources between relatively mature, and are a good foundation resource pools to optimize the runtime of the for a private cloud service. These technologies environment. Orchestrating changes in physical help make a cultural shift — the resources are resource configurations requires interoperability abstracted from users, and become increasingly with the underlying devices and device managers shared. Virtualization also introduces more- themselves via their standard or proprietary APIs or dynamic change, which requires fundamental interfaces. changes to operational processes. For standardized services requested from a catalog, the service optimization layer deploys to the resource pool based on pre-established policy. Resource allocations would be performed via interfaces to private or public cloud resources, such as VMware’s vCLoud or the Amazon Web Services APIs or via the cloud offering’s lower-level resource governor-like capabilities. Availability features would likewise avail themselves of capabilities within the infrastructure or be provided by orchestrating spare resources to replace failed resources (as in a fabric-based infrastructure). Network driver technology may also be provided to enable an overlay network designed to meet specific isolation requirements for either security or performance reasons, should this also not be available from the underlying resources. Service event, performance and usage data would be collected destined for the service management layer. There, it would be aggregated in terms of specific services to perform continuous service optimization via the service governor.
- 15. 15 About Cognizant Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world’s leading companies build stronger businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology innovation, deep industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work. With over 50 delivery centers worldwide and approximately 150,400 employees as of September 30, 2012, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500 and is ranked among the top performing and fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at www.cognizant. com or follow us on Twitter: Cognizant. Management Platform for Disparate Cloud Ecosystem is published by Cognizant. Editorial content supplied by Cognizant is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2012 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of Client Name’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website, http://www.gartner.com/technology/about/ombudsman/omb_guide2.jsp.