The Infrastructure Cloud represents a tremendous revenue-generating opportunity for service providers – especially for those already serving small and medium-sized businesses, which are just now starting to move up to the Cloud.
A scalable, virtual infrastructure, CI is a comprehensive set of services that provides you with everything you need to move your customers up to the Cloud – including virtualization, automated operations and billing, customer self-service, and an online store. It’s modular, so you can choose the services that complement your current offerings; and it’s extensible, so you can integrate it with your other services.
It’s also simple to use – a key requirement for small and medium businesses, which don’t have the IT resources that larger enterprises do. It requires no coding or scripting and is managed via an easy-to-use control panel.
The concern many IT organizations have with adopting a services approach to delivering infrastructure to traditional applications is understanding how to translate their existing best practices for configuring devices for security and performance into policy templates. Many IT organizations are learning the hard way about the sprawl created when virtual server images are deployed at will with minimal oversight i . As cloud computing technology ‘virtualizes’ the entire datacenter, IT staff will need to avoid the pitfalls they experienced in virtualizing their server environments. Enterprise IT staff will need management solutions that make policybased control as quick and seamless as deploying the virtual images.
