Estate Management
The access to Public Cloud compute, be it in Cloud Native or Hybrid Cloud modes creates a more dynamic and dispersed management requirement.
Add to this mix Edge Computing.
This Section looks at AnotherPeak technology and the business drivers surround their deployment
Overview
When the servers resided in your private data centre(private cloud) organisations could touch and feel, power up and configure.
Then came Public Cloud founded on flexible, dynamic and scaleable resources users could deploy instantly. These models made financial sense. Some companies moved everything to the Public Cloud, Cloud Native, whilst other created a hybrid model of private and public resources acting as one.
What could possibly go wrong?
Business Issues
Security & Compliance : where are my resources and hence the data stored on them? How secure is my cloud infrastructure and hence my business?
Billing : what am I actually paying for and what function are these resources supporting?
Maintenance : How do I ensure everything is up to date across my compute estate? What extra support services/tools are required? What is their cost.
Use Case - Visibility
The AP Client required a single portal to visualise all their private and public computational estate.
Once complete, the client wanted full visibility of all Public cloud resources including dormant and under utilised VMs.
Against this map cost implications and recommended changes.
Then the ability to maintain these resources.
Then test and deploy new services.
All from one portal
Use Case - Software Upgrade as a Service
A Device Manufacturer has robots/devices deployed on 3rd party sites. They utilise IoT protocols(Modbus, OPC). Triage and Software Upgrades are manual, man-on-site events. The Operational cost are large and client experience poor.
AP utilised Extensible Edge services with AI based protocol engines and a secure overlay back to the Operations centre.
Resulted in near-real-time triage, simple Software upgrades procedures and the possible introduction of Digital Twinning.
The use of protocol specific secure overlays dramatically reduce potential attack surface.
Use Case : Retail Analytics
Within a Retail environment an AP client wanted to feed Estate wide management services into an Analytics engine.
AP utilised Google Cloud to import key data flows and produce a range of business level metrics.
These ranged from the utilisation of certain assets(do you need more/less), to how people accessed the facility, where they went and how they interacted with digital signage.