Many application developers are already taking advantage of the benefits provided by public clouds, such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and a growing number of organizations are beginning to implement private or internal clouds. Others are experimenting with hybrid clouds, to provide self-service access to a shared pool of in-house virtual resources as well as services from external cloud providers.
Whether public or private, internal or hybrid, a well-designed Service Catalog is an essential ingredient of cloud computing. In order for the organization to reap the full benefits of cloud computing, users must be able to easily request the cloud computing services they need and IT must be able to respond quickly to those requests. The catalog empowers users to serve themselves by choosing from a menu of standard cloud service offerings, with automated fulfillment and billing initiated from this self-service "storefront".
Consider that public cloud providers like Amazon EC2 offer a self-service portal with standard options, pricing, online ordering, tracking, and billing. These capabilities are equally important for cloud computing within the enterprise, and it is the Service Catalog that: defines standardized offerings, communicates pricing options for different tiers of service, provides an easy-to-use interface for self-service, facilitates automated provisioning, tracks the lifecycle of the service, and captures demand data for consumption-based billing.
Some organizations are beginning to adopt hybrid cloud environments that combine services from both public and private clouds. These organizations will strive to implement the optimal combination based on their specific needs and resources. A Service Catalog can provide the policy and governance controls to manage requests for both internal IT and public cloud services, providing guidance and comparisons to drive the right decisions while reducing risk.
Any IT organization or managed service provider that plans to implement a private or hybrid cloud must implement a Service Catalog to establish standards, provide users with an easy-to-use online shopping experience, manage the self-service ordering process, and help orchestrate the automated fulfillment.
By making the self-service process easy and convenient, newScale Service Catalog software solutions can help you accelerate the adoption of cloud computing to reduce costs and improve efficiency. This same catalog can be used to manage requests for IT's physical server infrastructure, while driving demand toward lower cost virtual or cloud computing options when appropriate.
What's more, you can satisfy demand with fulfillment of requests in hours or even minutes, and not the weeks or months typically associated with traditional IT infrastructure processes. In doing so, IT can offer more responsive and cost-effective IT services - and thus prevent becoming "Amazoned" by EC2 or other cloud computing providers.
To learn more, you can go to our Literature Request section to download the Data Sheet for the newScale FrontOffice Suite for the Virtual Data Center.
