| Brand |
Cisco |
| Product Type |
Intelligent Automatino for Cloud |
| Feature 01 |
At a web-based self-service interface, users view service catalog options based on their roles, organization, and other access controls. Users can order services, provide configuration information through dynamic forms, and track and manage their services and usage on an ongoing basis. The catalog also helps IT to associate costs with various services, which can be integrated with billing and financial services for chargeback. The order process can also manage policies such as the lease period, so that services that are no longer needed can expire and the associated resources reclaimed for other uses. |
| Feature 02 |
Orders that have been placed and approved go through service delivery automation, which orchestrates the provisioning and configuration steps across all the elements. These elements include resources to be provisioned (compute, virtualization, network, and storage), configuration updates to be made, software to be provisioned, and supporting services to be set up (firewalls, load balancing, and disaster recovery). Service information updates flow back to the web-based portal, as well as to system management tools such as ticketing systems and configuration management databases (CMDBs) that need to be updated. |
| Feature 03 |
Operational process automation assists and coordinates the ongoing operational and support tasks for cloud management, including user management, performance management, alerting, service-level management, capacity planning, maintenance checks and procedures, and audit and compliance reporting. |
| Feature 04 |
Resource management uses the resource pools to provision, manage, deprovision, and configure individual resources to complete resource-level operations. Requests are orchestrated to domain resource managers or managed internally. Through this approach, Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud orchestrates resource-level operations across compute resources such as Cisco UCS or other hardware; hypervisors such as VMware, Xen, or Hyper-V; storage resources such as EMC and NetApp; and network resources such as the Cisco Nexus® family. |
| Feature 05 |
Lifecycle management involves creation and management of a service model, service definitions, and the underlying automation design for provisioning and managing each service. It also provides the ability to track all aspects of individual services that are running, including project and business information captured during the initial order as well as data about the various elements that were provisioned to support the service from initiation to retirement. |
| Feature 06 |
Cisco Cloud Portal: With the acquisition of newScale, Cisco now offers Cisco Cloud Portal, a comprehensive service catalog with capabilities for service design and lifecycle management, a web-based self-service portal that allows users to order and manage services, and built-in policy enforcement and tracking. |
| Feature 07 |
Cisco Process Orchestrator Integration Framework: The Cisco Process Orchestrator Integration Framework makes Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud easy to integrate with any data center element in the ecosystem. Using both standard connectivity and field-built integration, infrastructure elements and boundary IT service management tools are all connected into streamlined, comprehensive automated processes. |
| Feature 08 |
Dramatically improves IT agility: Business users order IT services through a self-service portal, eliminating back-and-forth information gathering sessions with IT. The end-to-end provisioning time for new services is reduced from weeks to minutes. This helps users to acquire infrastructure resources, deploy applications, and fulfill business needs more rapidly. |
| Feature 09 |
Increases employee productivity and promotes business-IT alignment: Because Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud automates many manual processes, it dramatically improves productivity of IT staff and frees the staff to focus on new projects. This helps IT to be more responsive to business initiatives and improves business-IT alignment. |
| Feature 10 |
Keeps IT in control through standards and policies: Automated and guided workflows promote the consistent implementation of best practices and policy-compliant processes. Approval steps can easily be built into the workflows, and detailed reporting and audit trails are generated. Because services are ordered for a specific period of time and provide visibility into associated costs through showback, chargeback, and billing integration, infrastructure sprawl is brought under control. |
| Feature 11 |
Maximizes asset utilization: Because systems can be rapidly repurposed (reprovisioned or reimaged), idle systems can become a thing of the past. As soon as a customer (internal or external) no longer requires a system, it can be put back into the available pool, repurposed, and put to near-immediate use, increasing the use of capital equipment. |
| Feature 12 |
Service Delivery Automation: Infrastructure orchestration: Automated processes divide service requests into their components and orchestrate the provisioning and configuration of the underlying resources as well as OS and software; Billing and chargeback: Automated provisioning provides consumption tracking and integration into metering, chargeback, and billing systems. |
| Feature 13 |
Operational Process Automation: User and system administration: This capability controls user identity, roles, and entitlements, keeping cloud tenants securely isolated from each other; Alert and incident management: Users can detect and manage system incidents, send alerts, and open support tickets; Automation control center: This console provides a single point for viewing and controlling automated processes. |
| Feature 14 |
Resource Management: Integration with resource managers: This capability integrates with resource managers such as Cisco UCS Manager and VMware vCenter for provisioning of individual resource components; Capacity management: Automated capacity utilization checks, alerts, and trending reports provide proactive capacity management. |
| Feature 15 |
Lifecycle Management: Service definition: New services can be defined using predefined templates. Service definitions include design descriptions, selection parameters, pricing options, and business and technical processing flows, all using a GUI; Automation design: Workflows can be created to automate all steps of the service lifecycle: service provisioning, decommissioning, modification, and upgrades. Workflows are created through a GUI. Both service definitions and automation designs can be modified easily with point-and-click tools, eliminating the need for time-consuming custom programming. |
| Feature 16 |
Deployment: Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud can be deployed as a comprehensive software solution together with a services engagement to assist with the preparation and planning, design, implementation, and optimization of cloud service offerings and delivery. |
