Controlled use of public clouds

Controlled use of public clouds

Customer Problem

Enterprise IT users, tired of waiting for resources have been, with increasing frequency, bypassing IT and using external public clouds such as Amazon’s EC2 with all the security and compliance risk implied. Enterprise IT needs to govern and audit this usage more closely and regain its status as an enabler of new tools rather than an inhibitor to progress.

Benefits

• Leverage public cloud in a secure, controlled, and audited manner
• Streamline the process for end users to access public and private resources
• Handle churn in the organization by keeping private keys and credit card information from end users
• IT becomes an enabler of public cloud adoption and an important control rather than an impediment

Key Functionality

• Permissions provide unified access control for public and private cloud access
• Launch plans and image lists provide unified self-service workflows for public and private cloud activity
• Audit trails provide unified auditing of public and private cloud access

Solution Details

Nimbula Director provides a self-service, elastic private cloud. By having a self-service cloud available to end users, the need for using external services such as EC2 diminishes – resources can be served just as quickly and with little friction. Oftentimes capacity demands cannot be met in the private cloud. In these cases if the compliance needs of the application are not too high, then secure, controlled, and audited use of public cloud is enabled.

End users are added to groups, which are given access to the public cloud. End users never see credit card numbers or private keys and cannot share them inappropriately. Usage is audited and can be revoked by simply changing group membership.

Operations for IT are simple as a single permissions system governs access to public and private resources. Operations for end users are also simple as the same self-service workflows and APIs are used for both public and private cloud activity. Nimbula Director turns public clouds into another tool in the IT toolkit to be used with confidence, not an end run bootleg process to be feared and resisted.