Cloud Management Data Sheet

Data Sheet
Cloud Management
Benefits
• On-Demand Service Delivery
ServiceNow’s service catalog
lets end users order and receive
standardized cloud services
in minutes.
• Optimized Costs and Usage
ServiceNow’s gives IT control
of cloud resources and services,
including full visibility of usage and
costs by business service, user and
other key metrics.
• Enhanced Service Quality
ServiceNow’s configures business
services and cloud infrastructure
accurately and repeatably, and
shows the impact of changes
before they are made. As a single
system of record for configuration
data and processes, it increases
service quality and vastly reduces
remediation efforts.
• Common Operating Model
ServiceNow’s provides a common
operating model and single pane
of glass for managing private and
public clouds. It manages the full
cloud lifecycle, including change,
configuration, problem, event and
lease management.
• Compliance and Security
ServiceNow’s is a unified access
point for cloud configuration and
service requests – making these
standardized and auditable.
It also provides consistent security
policies, delivering single sign-on
access to multiple public clouds
and accounts.
Today, enterprises must be agile to remain relevant and competitive. This is why
most have adopted the cloud in varying degrees – obsolete technologies and
legacy processes cannot respond to accelerating market demands. The cloud
gives organizations the flexibility and speed they need to succeed – but only if it
is managed effectively.
The Cloud Creates Challenges
While the cloud can revolutionize delivery of internal and customer-facing services, it also
creates significant new challenges:
• O
rganizations need an on-demand, service-centric approach to benefit from the cloud.
However, many do not have the systems and processes needed for agile service delivery.
•
The cloud creates high expectations. Internal users want services in minutes – not
days or weeks – and business leaders demand immediate results.
• IT often spends its time chasing tickets to meet this demand, rather than putting in
place the tools and processes needed to manage the cloud effectively.
•
As a result, unused VMs proliferate in the data center, public cloud costs rise out of
control, and end users are not accountable for the resources they use.
• Implementing common security across multiple clouds is also a major issue, since
there is no standard for public cloud security.
To meet these challenges, IT needs a common operating model across public and
private clouds – one that preserves the cloud’s agility while giving them complete
visibility and control.
ServiceNow Delivers Complete Cloud Services Lifecycle Management
ServiceNow Cloud Management automates and simplifies the entire cloud services
lifecycle. It creates an on-demand cloud service environment – accelerating service
requests and approvals, provisioning cloud resources, optimizing cloud utilization,
and driving down cloud resource costs. With ServiceNow, IT can standardize cloud
service offerings, create cloud resources on demand for DevOps, manage their cloud
environment consistently and efficiently, and ensure compliance and security.
ServiceNow delivers turnkey management for Amazon cloud infrastructure, and also
supports VMware clouds out of the box. It can be easily extended to manage other
public and private cloud infrastructure vendors – providing a common operating model
and avoiding vendor lock-in.
ServiceNow delivers cloud services on demand.
www.servicenow.com
Cloud Management
Data Sheet
Standardized Service Catalog
Using ServiceNow’s role-based service
catalog, enterprises can define a set of
standardized cloud services. End users
then simply select the services they
want, without having to understand the
underlying infrastructure complexity.
Once a user enters a service request,
ServiceNow fully automates end-to-end
delivery. This change process is driven
around the ServiceNow CMDB, and
includes approval routing, provisioning
of resources, and assignment of CIs to
specific users, services, applications and
cost centers.
ServiceNow’s service catalog can also
federate access to public clouds – users
can log into multiple clouds using a
single service catalog item. Security
policies only have to be defined once
within ServiceNow and are then applied
consistently across all clouds – there is no
need to manage role-based security on a
per cloud basis.
Configuration Automation
ServiceNow automatically configures
cloud resources, applying configuration
templates to both individual nodes and
groups of nodes. It supports plug-andplay, configuring nodes based on their
attributes. It can also manage patch levels
and activate the right monitoring agents for
each node.
ServiceNow includes powerful built-in
configuration automation capabilities
for Amazon, using CloudFormation as
the service blueprint. However, these
capabilities can easily be extended to
other clouds. ServiceNow can interface
with any platform that has a web services
interface, and it is also tightly integrated
with Puppet and Chef.
Business service maps provide powerful cloud visualization.
Cloud Discovery
ServiceNow discovery supports both
VMware virtualized infrastructure and
the Amazon cloud. It discovers a wide
range of Amazon cloud resources, such
as Elastic Block Storage, Elastic Load
Balancers and Amazon RDS. It also
handles Amazon Virtual Private Clouds
(VPCs), discovering resources and
services in public and private subnets
As ServiceNow discovers this virtual
infrastructure, it automatically updates
its CMDB with corresponding CIs and
relationships. This data is always up-todate and accurate, since ServiceNow
listens to Amazon’s AWS Config web
service for change notifications.
Business Service Mapping (BSM)
ServiceNow lets IT staff easily visualize
cloud infrastructure and services. It has
powerful business service maps that
display CIs and relationships in context.
It overlays incident, problem and event
data onto the CIs in these maps. This
gives users detailed visibility of the
impact of issues on nodes, applications
and services.
Cost and Usage Optimization
ServiceNow helps control cloud costs
and optimize usage. It provides a clear
breakdown of usage and costs by user,
business service and cost center, and it
also has extensive lease management
capabilities. Data is broken down on a per
CI basis, so that it can be viewed across
multiple clouds and public cloud accounts.
Administrators can easily pinpoint
underutilized cloud resources, and can
track the demand for different types of
cloud services. Users can see their own
resources and costs, which encourages
them to decommission any resources that
they are not actively using.
Role-Based Portals
ServiceNow gives administrators, end
users and IT staff the visibility they need
to use and manage cloud resources
effectively. Each user has a role-based
portal that delivers targeted information
and capabilities they require. For example,
operators see a public and private cloud
resource overview, and they can log in to
multiple Amazon accounts – including IAM
accounts.
www.servicenow.com
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