March 10, 2016 Leave a Comment
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Cloud

Leading Edge Technology – Not Just For the Enterprise

Hybrid Cloud.  These two words are individually or collectively on the minds of just about every business today, regardless of size.  Why?   If you’re implementing a private cloud, you will inevitably ask yourself if you should be leveraging public cloud for dev/test or an alternative place to deploy workloads.

Traditional people think of hybrid cloud as something that only enterprise customers would be utilizing.   But the fact is that hybrid cloud consumption is not just for large organizations but for everyone.  Even non-profits. To learn more, watch this video:

As individuals, we all watch our personal and family spending.   But for non-profit organizations, the term “doing more with less” has extra special importance.

the_salvation_army_0_72907Working in over 120 countries, the Salvation Army has the mission of meeting human needs without discrimination.  Accomplishing this vision in a cost-effective, economical way comes with a unique set of challenges as the Salvation Army needs to rapidly deploy applications and services on a very limited budget.

To scale rapidly into hybrid cloud, the Salvation Army looked to augment their private virtual environment with several public cloud services.  However, what looked good on paper resulted in a different story when it came to implementation. “Our first deployments were difficult and took months to move even one service,” said Randy Haan, Director of Infrastructure.

The Salvation Army quickly realized that a number of questions needed to be addressed before deployment.  Such as:

  • How do I secure my assets in the public cloud?
  • How do I deliver the same security to my public instances that I have in my private instances?
  • How do I make my public cloud system and services manageable from my private environment?

Not answering these questions first resulted in lengthy deployment cycles and problems for the Salvation Army.

“Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Business is the silver bullet,” says Haan.  “With Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Business, we can deploy into over a dozen public cloud providers with very little effort.”   It allowed the Salvation Army to securely extend development and test environments across public cloud providers all while ensuring the consistency of these environments.

https://youtu.be/Cmg8UjGwE1U?list=PLA0164FAC1A432DE2

A component of the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite, Cisco Intercloud Fabric works with the self-service portal contained in the Enterprise Cloud Suite to provision infrastructure in the public cloud instance.  Then utilizing the self-service portal, developers, line of business managers or IT professionals can seamlessly manage both private and public instances seamlessly from a single user interface.

Looking to take advantage of hybrid cloud?   Trust Cisco to enable your organization to utilize the cloud strategy that best works for your business.  The combination of Cisco Enterprise Cloud Suite and Intercloud Fabric take care of the underlying complexity of individual clouds to ensure consistency across environments.

With Cisco, hybrid cloud is not for large enterprises.
Learn more about Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Business or Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite