Top Requirements for Your On-Demand Service Infrastructure

Most CIOs recognize the need for a more dynamic, on-demand service model within the enterprise. In fact many IT shops are moving toward a mandate that “If it can be offered as an on-demand service to our internal customers, it should be.” The question is how best to achieve that goal?

Before developing an on-demand service infrastructure for your enterprise, make sure that you have taken into account the following requirements:

• Provider Agnostic: Enterprise customers will want to utilize services based on the products of many companies. Enterprises need to ensure that using a technology doesn’t create a lock-in effect that will prevent them from adopting competing products that might better suit their needs down the road. The ServiceMesh Agility™ Platform works with multiple cloud providers (simultaneously) to maximize the portability of workloads between clouds (even to your private cloud).
• Security: There are many security concerns that surround workload placement. Some security requirements come from internal requirements (keeping competitive information private, for instance), while others come from external requirements (government privacy requirements for customer data, for instance). Enterprise customers should strive to ensure that adequate security controls are in place, but allow enterprise customers as much latitude as possible within those controls. The Agility Platform delivers full role-based access controls, governance, and audit trails. Agility is being used today in highly regulated industries such as financial services and pharmaceuticals.
• Elasticity: A fundamental tenet of cloud computing is that capacity may be expanded, reduced, released and reallocated according to business needs. Without some amount of elasticity, your business won’t be able to react to transient demand. Of course, when demand drops, elasticity will also allow you to reduce your costs.
• Utility based consumption: Related to elasticity, pay as you go billing models fundamentally change the economics of enterprise IT, when properly deployed and managed. In addition to quickly spinning up a workload, you need the ability to shut it down and know that it is no longer adding cost. The ServiceMesh Agility Platform provides the automation tools to bring workloads online and take them offline at the click of a button, knowing that you’ll only pay for what you use.
• Reliability: A key architecture principle within an enterprise cloud is a shift from component reliability to service reliability. Single points of failure anywhere in the architecture are not acceptable. The architecture should maximize reliability by not only a redundancy of components, but also by different service providers that utilize multiple data-centers, with different networks, on separate power grids, and so on, with minimal dependency on any single provider.
• Automation: The key to agility is automation. Without automation, you’ll be walking while others run. ServiceMesh Agility Platform automates a number of tasks including workflow, stack assembly, and provisioning.
• Monitoring: As workloads become more dynamic, monitoring of those workloads becomes more important. Did the run complete normally or did it abort because of an error? Is the computed result correct or did something go wrong? ServiceMesh Agility Platform helps you stay on top of what’s happening by monitoring workloads running on multiple clouds simultaneously.
• Convenience: The Enterprise Cloud should enable convenient identification, deployment, and consumption of cloud resources to drive end-user uptake and maximize adoption of the cloud-operating model. ServiceMesh Agility Platform is built to leverage the existing skills of planners, architects, developers, and operations personnel. By improving business velocity, Agility becomes a valuable tool to move the business forward.