The Cloud Services division of IT service management giant EOH has unveiled CloudBolt, a comprehensive, agnostic cloud solution that offers a single pane of glass through which cloud customers can govern the use, performance and delivery of all their cloud services, irrespective of whether they are public, private or hybrid. It also allows users to repackage existing cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) resources to provision them as a platform as a service offering (PaaS), enabling simplified management of cloud environments on a large or small scale.
In today's software-defined digital age, the cloud has become fundamental to innovation. "However, cloud environments come with several challenges around usage-tracking, pricing and billing; and the management of multiple reporting systems, financial statements and operating models that result from the use of multiple cloud providers," says Richard Vester, Group Executive of the Cloud Services division at EOH.
He says businesses simply do not want to deal with this complexity. "The addition of multiple cloud services, and the general lack of standardisation and risk of vendor lock-in, is only compounding the problem."
This is where EOH comes in. This solution, a first in South Africa, has effectively killed off all of the limitations that businesses are finding in using and managing multiple cloud services across private and public platforms. It provides a common mechanism to access public and private cloud computing services, ensuring these services are both cost-effective and deliver as expected. In addition, it simplifies administrative tasks in multi-cloud environments, and offers a bridging mechanism for legacy, current and future technologies.
"This results in greater agility in managing multi-cloud environments, and in meeting end-user expectations of instant deployment," Vester adds. "Moreover, it not only manages upstream connections to the cloud, it provides management options downstream to the resource consumers, and provides total self-service capacity, while maintaining full control over governance and the policies required by enterprise IT."
This agnostic cloud platform works with new and existing environments, integrating on-premises virtualisation and private cloud resources with public clouds, configuration management tools, and domain-specific technologies. Its intuitive self-service portal enables users to rapidly provision the resources they require, while the IT department is still able to maintain control through configuration standards, usage quotas, and cost transparency.
Its single interface communicates with all the separate technologies on the back-end, and allows for the management of accounts and configurations for all of an organisation's cloud environments, as well as the establishment of infrastructure costs for charge-back and show-back. Decision-makers can set quotas, system leases and approval workflows, and configure a wide range of orchestration elements and extensible actions. Extensibility and configurability are built in, making conforming to IT best practices an inherent part of the provisioning process.
The solution gives businesses the freedom to change cloud technologies without having any effect on the end-user, and translates requests into the various languages and protocols used by each cloud provider, eliminating the need to engage in the multi-step, manual processes that come with provisioning new services.
In addition, it manages every asset it discovers within an environment, including networks, data stores, templates, clusters, and more. This not only completely eliminates shadow IT, it results in better performance, cost-effectiveness, and the power to reallocate and optimise the environment.
Finally, the solution eliminates all of the complication and delegation from resource provisioning, and by making organisational hierarchy clear, it allows the appropriate people to see system orders and who is using them. Each server can be owned by a single group, and approvals can be triggered based on groups and services criteria, Vester explains.
"This platform truly offers cloud freedom. Its single interface, which communicates easily with disparate technologies and provides a centralised view of activities across all environments, is like nothing else available on the market today. Co-ordinating multiple existing technologies while staying agile enough to accommodate the future and still dealing with end-users who are demanding easier access to their resources to deliver more, faster, no longer needs to be a headache. By removing all common cloud frustrations and challenges, CloudBolt from EOH has buried the final limitations preventing companies from moving into the right cloud for them."
Share