Times, they are a changing sang Bob Dylan in 1964. Little did he know that one day his lyrics would ring true for traditional IT departments who were seen as the sole provider of resources in the Enterprise. Whether you liked it or not, if you wanted a server for your development team, your company’s IT department would allocate this for you. The Enterprise has invested heavily in creating tools and processes to provide IT resources to its business units in an efficient and cost effective manner while providing control over who consumes these resources and how.
The advantages of cloud computing (rapid scalability, low barrier to entry, and dynamic pricing) have changed the way users consume IT as a service. Cloud computing provides the agility that businesses need today while shielding them from the complexities of a traditional computing environment: this truly enables businesses to react to the marketplace and leverage IT to achieve their objectives.
The first players in this new era of IT as a service were public cloud providers. As more users decided to use public cloud providers for their computing needs, it resulted in a number of “shadow IT” departments running their own operations in the cloud e.g. a software development group may opt to open an account with Amazon and use it to test their new mobile application while another group may decide to use Microsoft Azure as their cloud provider of choice. Cloud vendors provide easy-to-use tools to consume their services, which makes life easy for end users. However, this method of accessing cloud resources bypasses many of the controls put in place by IT departments for consuming resources onsite. Moreover, IT departments are also implementing in-house private clouds that need to be integrated with internal controls.
The tools and processes that worked seamlessly for in-house services may not apply or scale in this new world of multi-sourced IT as a service. A business may have a system in place that allows it to meter consumed storage in-house and chargeback to different departments, but the same system will break when applied to an assortment of public and private clouds. Similarly, security controls such as Identity management cannot be easily applied to public cloud accounts - who deactivates accounts in the public cloud when an employee leaves the company?
The real challenge that IT departments face today is: How do you bring back control to this new world without re-inventing the wheel of processes and controls and without limiting the benefits of cloud computing?
Dell Multi-Cloud Manager (DMCM) is a cloud management platform that enables aggregation of service interfaces of multiple cloud providers (both public and private) and provides similar level of controls that business leaders as well system administrators are accustomed to with in-house environments. It gives control back to the IT departments, without limiting the choice of cloud providers for its end users.
There are four key areas of cloud management that Dell Multi-Cloud Manager addresses.
- Access Controls: DMCM allows you to integrate corporate identity management systems with different cloud identity management systems.
- Governance: Governance allows for judicious use of cloud resources. For example you can allow software developers to create and destroy virtual machines, while restricting operators to only start and stop them.
- Billing: Using defined chargeback rates and quotas for consumed resources, IT departments can ensure responsible use as well as warn users when they are about to hit their defined quota of resources. It also allows for tracking of overall costs across all users.
- Application management: Using industry standard configuration management tools like chef and puppet and well-defined triggers such as CPU usage or even custom application triggers (such as number of active connections to a web server), cloud administrators can easily scale applications depending on demand.
In conclusion, Dell Multi-Cloud Manager provides control over the cloud environment without limiting the choice and agility that businesses demand. To experience the solution, why not avail of a free 2-week trial? Or if you would like to discuss how this solution could work in your environment, why not talk to your account team about scheduling an engagement at one of our 5 US Solution Centers?