Cloudbolt's Key Benefits and an Overview of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

The cloud is a digital infrastructure resource that provides hosted services over the internet. It was between 1950 to 1960 that the idea of the cloud was conceived. In 1961, John McCarthy gave a speech at MIT (Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology) saying that "computing can be sold as a utility, like water and electricity". It was a fantastic idea, although at the time, people didn't take it seriously and the technology wasn't ready for it. In 1963, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) presented MIT with $2 million for Project MAC. The money was used for MIT to develop a technology that would allow one computer to be used by several people simultaneously. The giant computer was born, with reels of magnetic tape used to store memory. It was the forerunner of what they called 'cloud computing'. It was when SalesForce, in 1999, delivered an online business application, that cloud computing began to gain the fame and momentum that it has. In 2002 AWS was created by Amazon, which provided online storage and computing, and in 2006, also through Amazon, came the Elastic Compute Cloud Commercial Service, a cloud service open to all. After that other cloud computing services were created such as Cloud Computing Enterprise Application from Google Play, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba, IBM among several others.

Cloud computing allows the storage and sharing of data, applications, services, and software over the Internet, enabling remote access from anywhere in the world. The cloud is composed of several servers that make up a large storage and data processing device, allowing elasticity in all your IT resources. With cloud services, you pay only for what you use, gaining in addition to various other benefits, savings and greater control over IT spending.

Benefits of the Cloud

The cloud allows access to a huge variety of technological services, so you can innovate quickly and in a much more practical way.

Scalability: Every company wants to grow, and to make this possible, it is important to think of a scalable and flexible operation. Your business may have different operation and storage needs, and the cloud allows you to scale as needed, giving your business flexibility. With the cloud your business has the ability to scale quickly, without needing a high investment in infrastructure.

Backup and continuity: control over your operation certainly contributes to the quality and success of your business. However, there are situations beyond our control, such as crashes or cyber attacks, and when it comes to disasters, the cloud is where you want to be. Cloud services allow you to quickly recover your data, applications, services, and software, thus preventing your services from being down for a long period of time. The cloud even helps you plan for disaster recovery; you can create multiple copies of your data and restore them when necessary, without the need for physical equipment, so you can get your business up and running quickly.

Cost reduction: With the cloud, you don't have to worry about having data centers within your enterprise that require a large investment. Cloud service providers enable you to pay only for the services you use space for. Avoiding unnecessary spending on storage and services that are not needed at the time. Since the cloud is scalable, you can easily contract more services or more storage space whenever you want, for much less than maintaining a physically running data center.

Flexibility: The cloud gives you full control to decide how your teams work. After the recent events that affected the whole world, the adoption of home office work among companies has grown, there are even several organizations that preferred to keep their employees working remotely, claiming better team performance. Whether face-to-face or home office, the cloud gives you the freedom to choose the best way for your business and your employees, and allows you (or any authorized person) to access data and services anywhere in the world, anytime.

Security: No matter the size of your operation or how many customers your company serves, security is a major factor for all organizations.Cloud service providers themselves already offer security policies and rules, but you can add even more security steps, such as encryption, traffic filtering, and setting authentication rules for users and devices. Each provider has its own security services, and you can hire as many as you need to ensure the security of your organization and your customers.

Cloud Types and Services

There are three cloud models, and three types of service they offer. Each organization chooses the cloud service and model that best suits the needs of the enterprise, and may also choose hybrid cloud.

Public cloud

The storage, servers, and software are owned by the cloud service provider. In this model, you share the same hardware with other organizations. The servers are constantly improving their interfaces and security measures. This is the most widely used cloud, and the cost is lowest.

Private cloud

It can be hosted in a physical data center in the enterprise, or it can be hosted by a provider. In a private cloud, the hardware is unique to the organization that contracts for this service, and the resources are used exclusively by the organization. You can customize the private cloud as you see fit for your operations, and you have more control over which resources are shared and which are not.

Hybrid Cloud

It is the junction of 2 or more clouds, public and private. This type of cloud offers more flexibility for the company. The hybrid cloud offers more security, since some information can be stored in the public cloud, where only the company will have access, and may have information in the public cloud, for better data sharing. According to George Dagher, Head of CloudBolt at GWCloud, "With the hybrid cloud, companies do not have the limitation of an on-premises environment (which is limited only to the physical resources that exist in the structure). With the hybrid cloud your business has elasticity and flexibility. When that environment gets crowded, the company can extend it, enabling improved service quality, bringing speed to the business and creating a real digital transformation model."

The digital transformation

There are many benefits to moving operations to the cloud, one of which is being able to effectively implement digital transformation, which is the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business. When a company implements technology in its processes, such as artificial intelligence, data analysis, and above all cloud computing, the entire operation is changed. With digital transformation companies can grow faster, innovate and modernize their processes, accelerate workflows, and streamline service delivery. Organizations that embrace digital transformation have a better chance of staying ahead of their competitors, as with technology, innovations can be implemented faster. "When the digital transformation of banks started, with automations, they increased their portfolios and profitability in a scary way, because before they had 10 hours to sell their services, for example, and then they went to 24 hours of sales." - George Dagher.

The CloudBolt

CloudBolt started as a cloud management platform and evolved to offer a comprehensive cloud governance, visibility, and automation framework designed specifically to bring order to your chaos. With innovation and acquisition, CloudBolt has developed capabilities that benefit everyone in an enterprise - ITOps, DevOps, SecOps, and FinOps, which enable self-service IT, tool and cloud integration, clarity on spending rails guardrails for better governance, reuse of elements, blueprints, constant refinement and enhancement.

CloudBolt brings some facilities, such as extensibility. You can integrate with different tools, automating all your processes and reducing operational costs. Cloudbolt is a solution that enables the deployment of limits, rules and policies so that your customers can consume resources in a simple way, through a self-service portal.

Process Automation

Automation is extremely important for a business. By automating processes, organizations have numerous benefits, such as easy access to information, time optimization, increases team productivity, enables task standardization, reduces costs and allows organizations to have more control over process management. With CloudBolt's OneFuse integration platform, your company can integrate platforms, endpoints and DevOps tools much more easily. The platform delivers cloud automation through abstraction of the underlying integration complexity. By featuring diverse cloud infrastructure integrations, such as services that can be reused repeatedly, the policy ensures governance compliance without requiring domain or coding expertise.

According to the Head of CloudBolt, "automation reduces the execution time of processes, reduces the margin of error, because all processes will always be executed in the same way, if they are well defined, besides bringing traceability, that is: you can know where, how and with whom you are; or why a process stopped you."

Challenges of multi-cloud adoption

The cloud offers many benefits to organizations, including being able to avoid being locked into a single vendor, as it allows you to keep costs down since you can move workloads between clouds to take advantage of price variations between them. However, there is the increased complexity. However, there are a number of challenges, and integrating hybrid cloud services is not that simple. According to George Dagher, "a cloud set up without control can break your business. You hire the most expensive server because you think it's the best, and at the end of the month a bill arrives for $30,000, for example, and that machine was not used and scaled correctly. And that cost, which in theory was supposed to be low, becomes much higher than if you had bought a physical machine. Organizations need a cloud management tool."

Total Cost Of Ownership, or TCO, is the cost your organization has to operationalize some service. CloudBolt enables your company to automate processes. With this, you no longer need to go through a person to request a service, which decreases your company's TCO, as well as increasing ROI. In the optimization process CloudBolt brings insights, where the size of the machines being used is analyzed, and whether they are being used in the right way. The platform checks the resources that are not being used, but have been allocated, and identifies savings that your company can make by booking them. George Dagher explains that "once a company deploys the CloudBolt tool in its operations, on the management side alone there are savings of more than 20% of cloud spending."

IT teams often end up leaving several blind spots that are extremely dangerous to their operation. CloudBolt offers insights, effective governance and management capabilities, so you can better manage your clouds without leaving security gaps that can compromise your business, and take the mystery out of cloud costs by providing the information and metrics your team needs with granular reporting and dashboards. CloudBolt solutions provide the understanding you need about cost optimization and allocation, chargeback if billing that allow you to take action before usage and costs get out of control.

With the absence of an effective centralized management solution, the teams' work doubles in complexity and the ultimate consequence of blind spots is the loss of competitive advantage. While your competitors are managing the complexity of the multi-cloud with more streamlined processes, they gain more time to value, innovate, and deliver products and services more profitably. If your organization freely provisions computing resources in complex and disorganized environments, execution is not coordinated, and there is no effective optimization. With an efficient cloud provisioning process, it is easier to provision, test, develop, and execute the resources you need.

CloudBolt has emerged to provide central visibility and control of the complexity of cloud choices and vendors, and is the solution for any IT team that doesn't want to deal with the headaches of multiple complex choices that the cloud requires.

The platform offers:

• self-service interface for IT
• Multi-cloud enablement
• Hybrid Cloud Automation
• Cost Analysis: Chargeback
• Instant insights: dashboards, reports, and analysis
• A portal for DevOps and software development
• Cloudy agnostic workload delivery
• Integrated access to legacy systems
• Visibility and transparency
• Governance, security and operational efficiency
• IT self-service and user empowerment
• Hybrid cloud management with support for over 18 different virtualization systems and public clouds
• Brownfields and green space management
• Service Lifecycle Management and Orchestration
• Paper-based access control and governance
• Centralized management and reporting
• Transparency and cost management for multi-cloud environments
• Extensibility: Integration with legacy and existing technologies
• Multi-channel alerts for security incidents

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With CloudBolt solutions you can implement chargeback/showback, drive value from existing IT investments, automate IT deployments, have visibility and control, and have workload flexibility to facilitate DevOps. CloudBolt's hybrid cloud management platform, centralize management of current and future cloud solutions, in an easy-to-use portal that drives self-service, aggregates operational data and reporting, promotes automation, and provides visibility and control.

CloudBolt optimizes how your organization manages multiple clouds, empowering work and providing administrators with a complete view of all resources and access controls. CloudBolt takes the guesswork out of who uses cloud services, when those services are used, and where those services were accessed from.

CloudBolt also allows your IT team to determine how you want to increase access to all data across all cloud networks. With this self-service model, your company can provide resource leasing and cost-tracking automation, monitor privileged access to data, and separate departmental data internally.

CloudBolt comes ready to use, and integrates with any platform that exposes an API, and existing tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, ServiceNow, Infoblox and many others - to fully automate the provisioning process, enabling automation of complete workflows. Multi-tenancy allows different departments or organizations to leverage the same CloudBolt server, thus ensuring privacy, security, and separation of data and resources between departments while enabling CloudBolt administrators to configure automation, global policies, projects, and actions specific to each organization or department. This scalable approach enables CloudBolt administrators to report globally on usage for all customers across all public clouds and data centers.

With CloudBolt self-service IT, users can request what they need when they need it, without having to open a call to IT and wait for that group to deliver what was requested. You can consolidate public and private cloud environments into a portal where users can consume, manage, and track IT resources, regardless of where and how they are hosted. By connecting to a public or private virtualization infrastructure, CloudBolt synchronizes all discovered resources in its database. Once a server has been imported and is under CloudBolt management, any modifications, whether made from inside or outside CloudBolt, will be tracked and communicated with "Brownfield and Greenfield Management". Service Lifecycle Management and Orchestration helps you provide end users with the means to architect solutions using a consistent method using automation, IT resource deployment, and compliance. CloudBolt uses blueprints to support IT in creating repeatable processes for server and service delivery. All deployment processes are encapsulated in a blueprint and made available to users via a catalog, allowing them to instantiate their own resources. CloudBolt's blueprints make anything-as-a-service (XaaS), which are delivered through its catalog. It maintains the necessary governance and controls to avoid overflows and supports any cloud environment you choose, plus extensive technical support.

CloudBolt gives your enterprise role-based access control and governance. You can define and enforce refined access by user role across systems, applications, and environments. By centralizing cloud management, CloudBolt maintains a detailed access history of on-premises, cloud-based systems for auditing and security purposes. Business units, projects, teams and users can be assigned quotas that control resource spending and usage. Limits can be placed on CPUs, memory, disk, cost, and server count in any combination. CloudBolt enables integration with existing technologies; use your existing workflows and automation scripts through CloudBolt trigger points to interoperate with even the most complex enterprise and IT environments.

In addition to the ultimate intuitive and customizable user experience, CloudBolt provides administrators with extensive management capabilities where they can perform a wide variety of actions on servers without leaving the browser, including accessing out-of-band console and SSH/RDP, running remote scripts, controlling power, changing resources, managing snapshots and performing other management actions. The power scheduling feature allows users to reschedule a time that specifies when the VM is not being used. CloudBolt turns virtual machines on and off according to the schedule that has been assigned, saving costs in public cloud environments, especially when applied to VMs that are only used during certain times (e.g. dev and deteste VMs, which are only needed during daylight hours on weekdays). IT resources cost businesses a lot, whether in the public cloud or private data center, and CloudBolt gives end users the ability to see and understand what is being spent, before they are faced with a huge bill with no control, plus the ability to set spending limits on individual user groups to ensure that spending does not exceed a specified limit.

By adopting CloudBolt in your operations, your operation feels the impact immediately, and can enjoy the benefits in the short term. According to George Dagher, in the short term your organization can have a service catalog to be consumed through the tool, and have a single platform for users to access and make requests, regardless of the cloud provider. The Head of CloudBolt also says that with CloudBolt it is no longer necessary to have a specialist in different clouds to provide the service, since within the platform you can create your templates, and it is applied to all your clouds.

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CloudBolt‍ Security

The average cost of a security data breach is $3.9 million, and the cost of one hour of IT downtime can be over $1 million. The visibility that CloudBolt provides is critical when it comes to hybrid cloud. CloudBolt's role-based access control is one solution for your organization to avoid spending large amounts of money for security and compliance mistakes. With this feature, you can define walls around the resource pool, and provide passwords for relevant groups and users. This keeps unwanted people out of your data and protects your working environment. In addition, you can monitor for lapses and gaps so that you can manage them before they become a high expense.

To find the security vulnerabilities you can run a periodic scan on your environment to check for conditions such as open ports, for example. CloudBolt also supports tag management of AWS,VMware, Azure, and other clouds on your servers, so you can run periodic checks on environments to keep a log of untagged resources, and this can help you drive tagging hygiene and thus improve security. You can also define the actions to be performed once the policy condition is met.

With the CSMP (cost and securitymanagement platform) you are able to improve your security and compliance posture continuously. Cloud environments can change rapidly and can cause issues with configuration tracking, so you need to maintain granular visibility continuously to enable monitoring and reporting. There are more than 300 security checks using CSMP. This service even allows you to remain compliant with regulations such as CIS, PCI-DSS, and even well architected AWS principles. So you can identify any non-compliant features, such as ports, software versions, and you can improve your security posture and change through proactive monitoring, driving business results.

About the platform's security, the Head of CloudBolt, George Dagher, states that "Cloudbolt follows international standards and different compliance standards for different business rules. Kumolus, the security platform, brings in different security standards and checks if you have any weaknesses, and indicates actions for correcting those problems." The CloudBolt platform brings security, compliance, cost reduction and better management, so that your business grows in an organized way, being able to adopt the recent innovations.

Want to learn more about cloud computing? We have created an e-book on the subject: https://www.gwcloud.company/computacao-em-nuvem

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