Organizations are realizing that without a formal comprehensive cloud strategy, line of business and application architects will continue to sidestep their internal IT organizations and procure solutions on their own – an industry phenomenon known as “rogue IT” which happens out of necessity.  While it helps solve the immediate problem, it brings with it a host of complications – compliance, governance, financial, security and more.

A formal cloud strategy helps ease cloud service adoption, drives standardization of services and increases the value of IT to the business.  For all these reasons, cloud is now considered a core element in many enterprise IT portfolios.

Yet for all the strategizing and trial steps taken by organizations, only a small number of companies have implemented true private clouds.   This is because automation is challenging but not as challenging as maintaining the manual and siloed methods used to manage the data center today.

People need deeper knowledge about automation. They have to understand the types of automation available. They want clear insight into the short-term and future impact of automation decisions made today so that they can create the right strategy for their business and select the appropriate automation methods and technologies to support their strategy.  Without the right tools and approaches to automation adoption, most organizations experience pain and chaos.

Increase your automation knowledge by attending for this upcoming live webcast featuring Dave Bartoletti of Forrester together with automation and cloud experts from Cisco.

Webcast Title:   A Better Way to Private Cloud

Date:     Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Time: 11 am Eastern/8 am Pacific

Register

What you will learn:

• How a pragmatic, stepwise adoption of automation accelerates adoption of cloud services within your organization
• How solutions engineered for hybrid-ready private cloud enable your organization to capture new revenue opportunities with on-demand delivery of applications and their supporting infrastructure
• How Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite offers you cloud strategy, automation, and management options

Developers, end users and customers expect continuous delivery and automation is the crucial element to making this happen.  Join us for this live webcast and hear how Cisco can let your business soar and take advantage of new business opportunities.

The number of attendees is limited so register today.

Tags: Cisco, cisco IAC, Cisco ONE, Cisco UCS Director, cloud automation, cloud service delivery, Enterprise Cloud Suite, vcac, vCloud Director, vRealize Suite

Private cloud – you hear it everywhere.  Industry analysts tell us that private cloud has become a core data center strategy  well on its way to becoming a core element in the formal IT portfolio.

Forrester research indicates that CIOs and IT departments are strongly drawn to private cloud as the on-ramp for their cloud journey.  What’s behind this interest and drive to shift?

Partially it is driven by the need to leverage existing data center infrastructure better.   But THE market driver responsible for the lion’s share of adoption is the need to accelerate application delivery.   We are talking about building applications faster and deploying them to the environment that has the right amount of elasticity, services and economics.

Yet for all the strategizing and trial steps, only a small number of enterprise companies have deployed a true private cloud.  Why? Without the right tools and methods, it is painful and chaotic. Read More »

Tags: Cisco ONE, cloud automation, Enterprise Cloud Suite, vcac, VMware, vRealize Suite

In previous blogs I have described how organizations are maturing beyond provisioning of individual servers to provisioning of richer cloud-based application stacks.  Known as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), this capability takes cloud technology beyond infrastructure to automate the application life cycle.  PaaS allows developers and IT operations to collaborate and ensure that application stacks are consistent and delivered to your customers — within minutes.

Last summer at CiscoLive Orlando, the Application Stack Accelerator for Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) was introduced and we quickly noticed that PaaS was an extremely popular topic!   This popularity has grown.  The demand for PaaS is heavy as organizations, probably like yours, look to extend cloud automation to the design, configuration and implementation of the application life cycle.       Read More »

Tags: application acceleration, cloud automation, Cloud Management, devops, IAC, open source, paas, red hat, Red Hat Summit, vCloud Suite, VMware

At a recent event I saw a T-shirt that said “Remember when cloud only meant rain?”  In the days before cloud computing, asking someone what they thought about cloud usually invoked a response about an animal-shaped formation or looking at cumulonimbus and predicting precipitation. One thing that today’s IT clouds have in common with their heavenly-based brethren is the ability for IT clouds to make it rain for your business.  When cloud is a part of your business strategy, they can increase business agility and effectiveness that translate into revenue generating opportunities.

Every day customers tell me what keeps them up at night is not how to reduce costs but how to survive. Cloud can take you far beyond survival to thriving  by delivering everything from data center services to applications to even office supplies.  But to get this benefit you need to bring together IT and your business strategy. And you need a new way of managing all these components in a unified manner.

Traditional management strategies and solutions utilize fragmented tools dedicated to specific systems.  They are ineffective in an environment where end users are empowered to request services on-the-fly and expect delivery almost instantly.

A customer told me this week that he believed all cloud management solutions were the same.    This is simply not true and two new reports from EMA and IDC provide supporting evidence.

Cisco’s cloud solution understands that your journey is a multi-step process.  You need to first automate your physical and virtual infrastructure to provide a foundational base for as-a-service, across heterogeneous hardware.  Let’s be honest – how can you increase efficiency when your solution manages a single hardware stack or hypervisor?

Cisco UCS Director delivers unified management and automation across both physical and virtual environments from a single pane of glass.   Designed to manage integrated and converged infrastructures utilizing Cisco UCS and Nexus fabric, UCS Director also manages third-party infrastructures such as HP, Dell and Brocade. Its innovative model-based orchestration tracks configuration changes ensuring that your business workflows run to completion, even if a switch is down or unavailable. UCS Director frees up your IT engineers from mundane daily management tasks allowing them to focus on more advanced projects.

Once infrastructure is automated, you can expand your horizons to automating the delivery of applications or general business processes.   Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC) is a full-stack cloud solution that includes embedded application provisioning, governance and usage tracking all from an end-user portal and service catalog that spans multiple cloud platforms and tenants.   Leveraging its networking strength, Cisco IAC simplifies  cloud-based deployment and management of network services with out-of-box templates for firewalls, load balancers and VPNs eliminating the need for manual, trouble-ticket based provisioning.   

Watch these videos to learn more about Cisco UCS Director and Cisco IAC.

Earlier this week, Cisco announced its open, hybrid cloud solution, Cisco Intercloud.  Cisco IAC is one of the management solutions powering this offering and is an example of Cisco IAC’s flexible cloud service capabilities – flexibility that your company needs.

With cloud becoming strategic to your organization’s IT strategy, Cisco’s two step solution of Cisco UCS Director and Cisco IAC gets you on the path to anything-as-a-service and your organization on its way to experiencing those rain making opportunities.    

Tags: cisco IAC, cisco intercloud, cloud automation, Cloud Management, Hybrid Cloud, private cloud, Public Cloud, ucs director, vcac, vCloud Suite, virtual network services, VMware

Cloud is changing the way businesses deploy and manage IT and business services. Industry analysts estimate that by the end of 2014, four out of 10 companies will have deployed a private cloud.

But where do you start?

Join Cisco and Forrester on February 18th, for this live webcast entitled: Cloud Management: It’s More than Just IaaS. Check out this promotional video then register today.

Tags: Cisco, cloud automation, Cloud Management, data center, forrester, IaaS, IAC, ucs director, VMware