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delivery enable the end users to select from a wide range of managed
Platform‐as‐a‐Service and/or Infrastructure‐as‐a‐Servicesolutions. The
service delivery platform is normally built upon the very same Cloud
foundation technologies as have been mentioned above. Automation
enables businesses to build on an integrated foundation improving speed
and dexterity while reducing cycle times. At this stage, they can simplify
administrative task through self‐service provisioning and also automate IT
service deployment. This frees up critical resources from routine tasks
which can then be reallocated to projects delivering higher value products
and services. A growing portfolio of Cloud solutions, various offerings of
business and industry solutions on the Cloud (public or member Clouds) are
normally offered as SaaS.
Orchestration
Orchestration drives seamless management of heterogeneous servers,
storage and networks by bringing diverse resources under a single point of
control, which helps guarantee specific service levels, improves reliability,
availability and security of service. Orchestration also ensures that the right
automation and prioritisation decisions are made when different groups are
competing for the same network bandwidth, data, and/or other computing
resources.
For example by optimising and making extensive use of orchestration a
global acting communication company was able to reduce their datacentres
from two hundred to five active datacentres globally.
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Performance management
The objective of integrating any Cloud solution, besides leveraging economic
benefits and providing services with an attractive content, is bound to be
user satisfaction at the end of the day. This correlates very tightly with the
performance of the individual applications. Shared use of resources (e.g
servers, network components, network lines) can cause overloads and long
response times which end users find irritating, and can lead to infringements
against SLAs, if these have been agreed. While measuring performance in
your own IT environment is fairly simple from a technical point of view these
tasks are a major challenge after integrating private or Public Cloud
solutions. The service level agreement will typically refer to Key
Performance Indicators (KPI). From the many possible KPIs you first need to
select a suitable combination capable of representing the expected
performance and making it measurable. These could relate to availability
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An expanded version of this chapter can be found under
