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Qualche settimana fa ho avuto l’opportunità di parlare con Steve Crawford, vice president of marketing and business development at Jamcracker Inc, rigiardo la la loro soluzione e la loro visione sul cloud.

Jamcracker è leader mondiale nelle soluzioni di intermediazione per servizi cloud (cloud services brokerage – CSB). Le aziende possono diventare broker di servizi cloud usando le soluzioni Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN). L’aspetto interessante è che queste soluzioni possono essere implementate on-premise (per aziende grandi e che magari hanno anche una cospiqua parte di private cloud, sia in modalità SaaS, potenzialmente più utile per aziende di tipo PMI.

Come è noto il cloud computing fornisce numerosi vantaggi, ma vi sono anche molti aspetti da considerare, sia per approcci di tipo cloud pubblico, ma anche per cloud privato e/o ibrido. Con una buoan soluzione di “cloud broker” è possibile gestire molti di questi aspetti e risolvere anche alcuni problemi (come ad esempio la gestione di servizi diversi e i criteri di scelta).

Citando Gartner (2012 ): “CIOs and IT management are seen as the key people responsible for the end-to-end delivery of cloud services. As such, they should become familiar with the growing industry trend of cloud services brokerage, its maturing functionality and the role it can play in the delivery of cloud services.”

Una piattaforma di Cloud Services Brokerages (CSB) deve fornire le seguenti funzionalità:

• Self-service catalog
• User and service management
• Cloud provisioning via service adapters
• Authentication, authorization, access control
• User support
• Consolidated billing & reporting

La soluzione di Jamcracker risulta interessante perché:

• Complete CSB enablement solution = Quick time-to-market
• Unifying services delivery since 1999–Proven platform, technology and business enablement–Delivering hundreds of services through dozens of Service Providers, Distributors and IT providers
• Cloud services ecosystem enablement –Abstracting complex technology & business issues –Complete “out of the box” solution including platform, cloud integrations and managed services “wrap-around”
• Technology and services agnostic–Flexibility to adapt to emerging needs
• Complete enablement solution–Quick time-to-deployment

La soluzione è basata sul seguente workflow di Cloud Services Brokerages:

• Catalog Management:
  • Service Definition and Integration: enables any service to be integrated into the master catalog
  • Catalog Management: multi-tiered catalog definition and management that enables creation and segmentation of catalogs
  • Jamcracker Service Delivery Network (JSDN): provides a catalog of 3rd party services with volume licensing and discounts
  • Service bundling: Enables bundling of public, private or hybrid service offerings
• Self-Service Fulfillment: employees gain access to private and public cloud services, sanctioned by IT, via self-service catalog
• Service and user provisioning:
  • Centralized Service and User Provisioning: all provisioning can be controlled from a central console
  • Policy-based automated provisioning: define complex dependent workflows, enables policy-based automation of workflows
• Authentication, Authorization & Accesso Control:
  • Single Sign-On (SSO): use federated identity to provide access to all services with a single password
  • Roles-based authorization and access control: provides granular control of cloud services access based on user role and privileges
  • Password policy enforcement: enables uniform password policy across the enterprise
• User and Service administration:
  • Centralize and automate CRUD events for services and users: provisioning, add-more, de-provision users from internal/external services
  • Centralize or delegate administration responsibilities: push policy and user management down to individual departments, etc.
• Reporting and auditing:
  • Reporting, Notification and Exceptions Alerts
  • Service Usage Tracking and Auditing
  • Configurable roles-based dashboard views
• Helpdesk ticketing & support:
  • Helpdesk console for user-submitted tickets
  • Multi-tier Support
  • Knowledgebase
  • Notifications and Alerts
• Billing, metering & chargeback: billing Aggregation and Settlement and consolidated Show-back Reports regarding internal usage (applies to on-premise and external services)

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.