Enterprise IT

The Enterprise IT use case focuses on SLA-aware provisioning of compute platforms, pursuing the most efficient resource selection at provisioning time, the optimal infrastructure landscape at run time, and informing future investment decisions. The ultimate goal is to illustrate how provisioned IT infrastructure can dynamically reflect and react to the changing priorities of the enterprise. SLA-enabling Enterprise IT can thus help to deliver IT-enabled growth.

Demo Videos

How a personalised SLA-guaranteed service is created…

The automatic detection of violations of an SLA-guaranteed service…

How different schedulers can be invoked…

How in-depth reports on infrastructure SLA performance can be generated…

How the concept of Acceptable Service Violations can be used…

How Availability Restrictions can be employed…

How a platform like SLA@SOI can assist with investment governance…

Business Scenarios

Three business challenges, or scenarios, are considered in this use case.

Provisioning responds to the issue of efficient allocation of new services on IT infrastructure, SLA negotiation and provisioning of new services in the environment.

Run Time deals with day-to-day, point-in-time operational efficiency decisions within the environment. These decisions maximise the value from the infrastructure investment.

Investment Governance builds on the previous two, demonstrating how they can feed into and inform future business decisions. Fine-grained SLA-based data is provided to influence future investment decisions based on capital, security, compute power and energy efficiency.

Taking the provisioning scenario as an example, the IT Hosting department deploys the SLA@SOI Framework on their internal cloud infrastructure. Seven key steps have been identified in the resulting provisioning process. Steps 1-5 are controlled via customer initiated UI interaction with framework components. These replace the manual negotiation steps of existing engagement processes. Steps 6 and 7 are then carried out by the internal components of the SLA@SOI framework; these remaining steps are the automated process governed by the UI.

Business Impact Categorisation

One key concept being pursued in this use-case is autonomous Business Impact Categorisation (BIC). Taking overall Business Level Objectives, Organisational Health, the organisation making the request and the Enterprise Capability Framework into account, a BIC level is automatically identified and assigned to the services being provisioned. Based on the BIC, and assuming a heterogeneous cloud environment, the SLA@SOI Framework is then able to intelligently provision the services onto the most appropriate infrastructure. The most business-critical services can be automatically provisioned onto the most efficient and powerful infrastructure available. Subsequently at runtime, optimisation algorithms can dynamically reprovision any lower priority services out of the way.