New trends keep on hitting the Cloud Market, caused by both changes in infrastructure creation approaches, and enterprises’ aim to make the infrastructures more effective – in performance, and from the financial point of view.
While communicating to project teams and customers, Maestro team has collected a set of typical questions, and we decided to aggregate the answers in a series of two blog posts.
And we would like to start with the questions, related to one of the hottest topics now – Maestro as a Service integration and Management Platform.
1. How should a SIAM model from your point of view look like?
SIAM is a framework needed to manage multiple service providers and their services effectively, in a unified manner, by incorporating them into a single platform.
Maestro as a SIAM framework allows arranging effective operation and infrastructure services for an enterprise. It has an API-first approach which allows both effective adding new own components, as well as integrating third-party tools. Maestro provides services for costs tracking, control and management, security and compliance checks, automation, events tracking, performance monitoring, and others, necessary to ensure virtual infrastructure effectiveness.
As a result, it brings the following benefits:
- Enterprise business application teams – can concentrate on reaching the business goals, and minimize effort for setting up infrastructure and configuring necessary operational services.
- Enterprise admin teams – have a unified entry point to enterprise applications services, both individual data and enterprise-level aggregation.
- Enterprise support teams – Can quickly introduce and effectively manage services for the enterprise, in a unified way, and with automatically detected organization layering, permissions, etc.
2. How would you describe the role of the service integrator in the SIAM model?
A service integrator acts as a central coordinating point responsible for integrating and managing multiple service providers. When it comes to working with enterprise infrastructures hosted across multiple clouds, a service integrator enables unification and single entry point to:
- Role-based access to all providers, based on the corporate organization structure.
- Resources management, inventory and discovery across all platforms
- Costs review, management, and optimization procedures
- Security and compliance checks
- Automated resource management
The service integrator allows both diving deep into the details and controls within a specific provider, as well as gives generalized summaries and trends across the enterprise.
It also allows creating a centralized service catalogue which allows end users to get necessary setup in several clicks, in a cloud-agnostic manner.
3. What services would you see to be centrally provided by you and which ones would you leave with the application teams?
On a centralized level, the general culture of accountability and reasonable resource usage should be introduced to an enterprise, paying attention to specifics of different organization layers.
On enterprise level, access and permissions, reporting, costs control and optimization, security status controls, events audit, resources inventory, automation, centralized automation service catalog, infrastructure optimization should be implemented.
Meanwhile, for each of the services to perform to its maximum, the application teams should also be encouraged to implement specific changes in the resources within their responsibility scope – such as, establishing proper tagging strategies, configuring monthly expenses quotas, or remediating detected security issues.
4. How would you address the challenge with continuously and dynamically changing cloud assets in the new platform?
To keep track of the changing cloud assets, their performance, costs and security state, effective inventory and discovery mechanisms can be used, with the API offered by the platform provider.
An Analytics Dashboard is used as an aggregator of the infrastructure information, updated in the real-time mode. There, the user can find the main information, peaks and dropdowns displayed, as well as gets the possibility to perform a detailed investigation of specific values.
5. What Asset Management system are you planning to use?
In addition to assets discovery and inventory, in is important to review them in terms of security, costs and performance optimization.
Maestro has an Insights mechanism that aggregates both the information from the public cloud providers, and the recommendations built by third-party and own mechanisms. These recommendations cover instance lifecycle management, rightsizing, costs, and security.
Still, it should be kept in mind that the request for the final agreement on the asset management procedures should be also aligned with the specific business request and take into account not only specific assets, but also the enterprise structure and infrastructure management approaches.
We have also collected a set of questions related to automation and financial management for multiple partners, and you can find the answers here.
We are also glad to remind that getting from theoretical knowledge of Maestro to the practical one is very easy. If you would like to know more about Maestro, get a real life look and feel experience, and find answers to the specific questions related to your business – do not hesitate to request a demo on Maestro web site!