Gartner report on cloud360 cloud management platform

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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.

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