Issue link: https://resources.cloudbolt.io/i/1399327
The cloud team is tasked with implementing various cloud-based services and exposing them to students and staff in a controlled and reliable manner. They needed a unified interface that would allow end users to easily find and request services. They wanted to enable the use of both public cloud providers and existing university assets while tracking and reporting resource usage to better understand and manage respective costs and capabilities. Challenge Solution With CloudBolt, the university was able to: Automate requests for IT resources by faculty, staff and students Provide a controlled but flexible self-service IT platform Centralize management and reporting of resource usage Reduce VM sprawl through active system lifecycle management Re-purpose IT resources to advance the university's educational mission Implement flexible and burstable licensing for cost efficiency Empower educators with surplus IT With CloudBolt, the university was able to re-purpose surplus capacity from their corporate environments, and put it to use by educators—enabling students to access server and application resources to support their class work. Self-service access to non-traditional resources Beyond just provisioning VMware and AWS CloudBolt- backed servers, CloudBolt was easily configured to create S3 storage buckets in AWS, as well as provision Drupal accounts in the Acquia Cloud Platform for Drupal. End-to-end automation Automating the routine provisioning and management meant systems administrators could do more with less, increasing the server-to-administrator ratio. Removing the people from the process also improved compliance, reduced OpEx costs, and significantly increased the pace at which the IT team was able to offer new services. Cost and utilization transparency Once CloudBolt imported the customer's existing environments and servers, the university was able to determine which colleges and departments were using resources. The university was then able to re-assign budgets to better support demonstrated need. Customer satisfaction through better availability As the demand for compute resources in support of Big Data and other compute-intensive workloads increases, faculty and staff are impatient in getting access to additional resources. CloudBolt replaces time-and resource-intensive manual processes by allowing end- users to drive the provisioning and server management process on their own. Multiple authentication points University faculty and staff authenticate against a different Active Directory endpoint than the student population. CloudBolt's multi-tenant capabilities ensure that every user is authenticated to the correct environment, and presented with the expected branding when logged in. C A S E S T U D Y