Texas Cloud Brokerage - A Success Story
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Texas state agencies wanted a solution to plan, provision, and manage cloud IT services from multiple providers to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Gravitant implemented a cloud brokerage portal called the Texas Cloud Services Portal that allowed agencies to design architectures, estimate costs, provision resources, and monitor billing across Amazon, Savvis, Terremark, and other providers. The portal provided consolidated visibility and control over cloud spending. It was successfully piloted by several state agencies who were able to launch applications in just two days, demonstrating the agility of the cloud.
Texas Cloud Brokerage - A Success Story
- 1. CASE STUDY Gravitant Powers First Cloud Services Brokerage Portal for State of Texas AT A GLANCE THE CHALLENGE Texas State Agencies wanted a better way to plan for cloud IT services, govern procurement and contracts, control provisioning, and manage costs in the cloud. They faced issues such as vendor lock-in, VM sprawl and cost uncertainty. THE SOLUTION Gravitant’s cloudMatrix technology offered Texas the ability to stand up a Overview powerful and dynamic web-based cloud brokerage portal for government agencies to design, order, provision, Cloud computing has already established itself as an alternative to and control IT services across multiple providers. traditional IT with shorter procurement times, lower cost and greater agility for both private enterprise and government IT needs. However, THE RESULT users find that it is difficult to onboard and manage this new evolving Texas State Agencies were able to simulate cross provider provisioning and rapidly changing technology. and estimate cost prior to deployment. The portal also Texas State Agencies wanted to use cloud services but needed an allowed Agencies to establish effective way to plan for cloud IT services, control provisioning, and complete command and control into manage costs in the cloud. Texas State Agencies required a solution their cloud IT. Gravitant’s cloud that aggregates services from multiple providers, integrates into brokerage solution therefore maximized the opportunity for existing technologies, enforced audit and approvals, managed costs, Agencies to leverage cloud and could be customized for each instance – in other words, they computing to improve government needed a cloud services brokerage solution efficiency. www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 [email protected]
- 2. THE CHALLENGE A common lament from CIOs is that IT is often “…characterized by low asset utilization, fragmented demand for resources, difficult to manage environments, long procurement cycles, and a decreasing IT budget.” Similar challenges arise with cloud services and make it difficult for customers to realize the full capabilities and advantages of cloud technology. With thousands of different cloud service providers with different offerings and pricing models, customers have a difficult time selecting the cloud service provider and an offering that best meets their needs. The contractual solution, and often times the optimal solution, may require mixing and matching of services from multiple cloud providers, but the resulting billing situation with multiple bills from different providers is a nightmare. “Every Cloud Provider is different, and we don’t know who to pick or how much it would cost ahead of time” - IT Director, Texas State Government The Texas State Agencies wanted to spin up resources on demand and spin them back down when needed. But different terminology, standards and technology across providers creates inefficiency. Network and security settings needed to be identified and configured per provider. Furthermore, the lack of automation with many cloud providers adds extra and often unknown manual processes to provision resources. Also, the cloud providers did not offer any solution for Agencies to track how much resources have been utilized by each application and apportion the bill accordingly. This level of transparency is needed for chargeback as well as SLA compliance, cost and resources control and to ensure that ever-changing IT demands are being met. All of this made it a challenge for the CIO’s office to maintain visibility and control over IT spend. What the CIO’s office needed was a solution that aggregated services from multiple IT providers, could easily integrate into the existing technologies, and could be customized for each instance. In other words, Texas Agencies were in need of a cloud brokerage. THE SOLUTION Through the Pilot Texas Cloud Offering initiative, sponsored and created by the Texas Department of Information Resources, Gravitant instantiated a powerful and dynamic web-based cloud brokerage portal called the Texas Cloud Services Portal (TCSP). This portal runs on Gravitant’s innovative cloudMatrix CSB Platform and enables Agencies to design, order, provision & control IT services (public, private, and hybrid) across providers. Portal Capabilities Wizard based tools for screening applications ripe for the cloud, identifying target cloud infrastructures, estimating capacity required on the cloud, comparing provider prices side-by-side, creating a migration roadmap, and finally evaluating the ROI of cloud migration. Single view for designing application architectures in the cloud, assigning portions of the architecture to different cloud providers, automatically provisioning the entire architecture simultaneously, and cost estimation. Dashboards for consolidated billing, utilization monitoring, and security monitoring. Command and control screens for; provisioning authorization control, workflow orchestration, and provider compliance evaluation. www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 [email protected]
- 3. State of Texas Implementation At the center lies the cloud services broker platform – cloudMatrix - which integrates cloud services from public, private, and hybrid clouds as well as managed services and migration services. Above cloudMatrix lies the cloud management services fabric that allows for auto provisioning, consolidated billing, chargeback, command and control, and governance. These management services were critical for successful adoption of this portal in the government sector. All of this is exposed to the consumers through the Texas Cloud Services Portal which is accessible through the web in the form of SaaS. The participating agencies included: Texas Secretary of State, Texas Water Development Board, Texas Department of Transportation, and Texas Department of Information Resources. THE RESULT The TCSP portal allowed the agencies to get hands on experience with cloud architecture design, sourcing, provisioning, monitoring, and billing. Agencies were also able to get their legal and financial groups involved in the procurement process through the portal’s user administration and access control capabilities. There are currently 18 Virtual Data Centers provisioned through the portal across Amazon, Savvis, Terremark, and Vintage IT Services. The success of the TCSP solution was expressed in public at the 2012 Texas Association of State Systems for Computing and Communications (TASSCC) conference. A panel of speakers representing the different participating Texas agencies as well as Gravitant was organized to describe the cloud experience and provide future recommendations for federal government as well as other state agencies. The pilot program has been extended through 2013 in an effort to accommodate more agencies. The Texas Department of Information Resources has published a lessons learned document as a result of the combined shared experiences of these Agencies as well. “We have seen the agility of the cloud first hand. Using the cloud brokerage portal from Gravitant, we instantiated the Texas Voters Registration application and launched it in just 2 DAYS. That was a great proof point for us.” - Information Security Officer, Texas State Government A B O U T G R AV I TA N T Founded by innovative executives with over five decades of combined experience in Enterprise IT management, operations research, advanced analytics, and service -oriented architectures (SOA), Gravitant offers next-generation on-demand cloud broker and management applications for enterprise IT organizations. For more information visit us at WWW.GRAVITANT.COM www.gravitant.com (512) 535 - 7399 [email protected]