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Chris Moore

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7 Absolutely Terrible Ways You Run Your Hybrid Cloud

Posted by Chris Moore

8/5/15 7:00 AM


If you’re an IT administrator, there are good and bad ways to offer cloud services to your end users.  Get it right and your customers purr contentedly.  Get it wrong and you get a claw to the face.  Here’s what to watch for.

1.   Taking Too Long

(“Where the @%#$’s my server?”)

cloud service provisioning

Been to a restaurant lately?  How do you feel if you can’t get a server?  The same applies to the IT end-users.  Do they want to wait weeks for servers?  No!

Why not let users serve themselves?  Better still, why not give them all they can eat?

 

2.   Being TOO Cloudy (Not being the broker)

cloud choice

Public clouds are very powerful tools that enable business agility.  But as a cloud consumer, you have an important choice to make.  If you choose to use a single cloud provider, you end up locked into their services and UI.  If you use multiple clouds, you must master multiple toolsets and UIs so that much of the agility is lost.

You can get the best of both worlds by deploying a Cloud Management Platform.  This makes you a services broker and allows you to leverage the power of hybrid cloud from a single UI.

3.   Making Manual Mistakes

                                IT mistakes

Fulfilling requests by hand takes time, which irritates the requestor.  Manual entry is also prone to fat fingering, resulting in VMs that are incorrectly provisioned.  The same goes for tracking costs.

Automating VM builds takes mistakes out of the picture.  Why provision systems by hand when a cloud management platform can do the job automatically, from a single UI?

4.   Leaving Money on the Table (or in the cushions)

 chargeback showback shameback

To paraphrase management wisdom, you can’t charge for what you can’t measure.  Call it what you like – chargeback, showback, shameback – but you’re making a mistake if you don’t track your cloud costs.

Cloud management platforms can track costs for you and your users automatically.

5.   Losing Your Control

                         cloud control

You are asking for trouble if you can’t quickly and easily answer these 5 questions:

  • Who owns the system?
  • Where it is deployed?
  • Why does it exist?
  • How long does it need to exist?
  • How much does it cost to run?

Just like a bank, you must have clear visibility of assets.

Be sure to choose management tools that enable you to answer these questions.

6.   Living Below the Clouds

 multi-cloud management

The one who lives above the cloud, reigns.  Don’t lock yourself into one vendor.  Build a provider-agnostic environment that allows you to standardize IT, introduce new technologies, and transition between clouds without your end-users even knowing.

Make sure you’re able to choose the right cloud for each job.  One size does not fit all.

 

7.   Being the Worker Bee, Not the Queen Bee

 self-service IT

The Queen Bee empowers her Worker Bees to do everything on their own. The same applies to IT admins and end users.  IT need to empower their end users to build and manage their own environments while still maintaining oversight of security, capacity, and performance.

By empowering end users, IT can save time and money.  And, most importantly, it makes IT an enabler rather than a barrier.

CloudBolt enables self-service IT.  To learn more, contact us to schedule a demo.
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Topics: CMP, Cloud Management, Self Service IT, multi-cloud

Running a Hybrid Cloud? Are you tracking usage and costs?

Posted by Chris Moore

7/27/15 3:57 PM

At Microsoft Ignite 2015, 72 percent of IT professionals polled said cloud usage and cost tracking are essential for business management. When not in conflict with other departments, many administrators struggle with efficiently tracking resource usage and costs. This issue was too clear with a major networking vendor. Their administrators spent countless hours each month manually tracking resource consumption. Since this method was prone to human error, the vendor deployed CloudBolt to automate their reporting process. Doing so allowed them to improve the accuracy of cloud usage and cost tracking across five hypervisors and public clouds.

In addition to manual cost tracking, some administrators also manually control resource distribution. Due to limited IT resources, a leading data storage provider’s administrators are afraid of end-users spinning up VMs from a self-service IT portal. The concern came from the idea that administrators would be unable to control how many VMs end-users provisioned. In response to this concern, CloudBolt allows administrators to set quotas that prevent end-users from running over their allotted resources. CloudBolt also allows administrators to set thresholds that alert them when resources are reaching max capacity.

Taking an automated approach lightens administrators’ workload, allowing them to be more productive in areas that were previously neglected. So, whether a company needs to improve the provisioning process, measuring or controlling of IT resource consumption, they should consider deploying a self-service portal. Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, government agencies and even the City of London have recognized the need for automated self-service tools, and they all chose CloudBolt as the solution.

CloudBolt has been recognized for its market leading time to value. With that in mind, simply submit a download request and test it out at any time.

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Topics: CMP, Cloud Management, VMware, Cloud, Shadow IT, Hybrid Cloud

Control the Clouds & Impress Your Stars

Posted by Chris Moore

7/21/15 1:57 PM

People crave a sense of control and importance, especially consumers.
Why? Because they are the stars of your business.

When consumers feel unimportant, they take their business somewhere else. Consider this: “78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.”1 If IT administrators provide poor service to their consumers, the IT end-users can go to AWS instead and contribute to VM sprawl. So, how does an infrastructure team avoid the unnecessary struggles that come from internal conflicts?

One method is to place an emphasized focus on keeping the IT end-users happy. In a world where virtually anything can be ordered on-demand, end-users are growing tired of tedious provisioning processes. They expect quick turnaround times on their requests, and Infrastructure teams struggle to keep up.

Automation is key.
In a CloudBolt case study, a major retailer’s infrastructure team failed to provide quick provisioning to their e-commerce group. As a result, e-commerce threatened to take Infrastructure’s budget to build a separate datacenter.  Doing so would have led to wasteful spending on areas where e-commerce lacks expertise. More importantly, Infrastructure would have lost their largest customer along with the ability to track usage and costs. By deploying CloudBolt, the retailer’s end-users gained the ability to build and manage VMs while administrators measure and control the consumption of IT resources.

Automating the provisioning process soothes end-user frustration while leaving complete oversight in the hands of IT administrators. Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, government agencies and even the City of London have recognized the need for automated cloud delivery platforms, and they all chose CloudBolt as their solution. CloudBolt has also been recognized for its market leading time to value.

What Now?
Join the crowd to see what CloudBolt is all about!
Simply submit a download request and give us a test.
 
1 American Express Survey: Good Service is Good Business: American Consumers Willing to Spend More With Companies That Get Service Right
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