And finally, provisioning.
So provisioning,
customers are using cloud management platforms and
orchestration tools to automate the provisioning
of networking and security with more speed,
efficiency, consistency and a reduction in operating expenditures or OpEx.
In the current model however,
the app team opens a request that
generates multiple tickets with the different infrastructure teams.
Finance decides, ''Hey, we want to deploy this new
application," or sales decides they want to deploy this new application,
they have to get all of the components for this application
deployed before they can actually install the application.
So they'd have to call networking to get some networking.
They'd call security to get security.
They would call the virtualization team to get the VM.
There's a lot of different tickets.
There's a lot of timing that all has to come together in order
to finally get that virtual machine to deploy the application.
That physical infrastructure that they request might be configured
manually to a command line interface or maybe there are scripts but either way,
there's a process for getting that done.
By having to have multiple groups within IT that get involved,
we introduce a complex coordination between these groups,
all of it leading to a longer time to market for this application.
In the new model, our workloads for
these applications three-tier applications, multi-tier applications,
it doesn't matter, our networking and security are
going to be provisioned along with the virtual machine.
The compute, the storage and network and security,
all come together within minutes.
The virtualization infrastructure is provided via the blueprint.
That blueprint was created by
the architecture team by communicating to the application owner,
''Hey, if we deploy this application,
exactly what information do we need?
Exactly what components do we need?"
The networking steps in to say,
''Hey, are we deploying a new network?
Are we going to connect this to an existing network?"
The security team steps in and says,
''Hey, what type of security does this need?
How does it communicate?
What pods does it communicate on?
Do we have a defined policy already for this?
Is it something where we need a new policy to create?''
All of these different individuals working together as part of this architecture team
to create these blueprints that give us
a standardized configuration to be deployed in minutes.
This cross-functional team of SMEs,
they build the automation quickly.
There's no hand-off in this situation.
Once they're done, and the blueprint is built,
we don't need to go back to the architects again.
The self-service portal will allow the instantiation of
that application and they're comfortable because they designed the blueprint.
There might be a revisiting.
We might come back to it to say, ''Hey,
do we need to make any changes at some point?''
But that change again will now be localized to that blueprint.
We don't have to make
architectural changes to the physical network or to the cluster design,
it's a blueprint change localized within the automation engine.
So here are some topics to think about with regards to process transformation.
With regards to change,
how might you optimize change management in your environment based on NSX capabilities?
What challenges might you face and how will you address them?
For configuration, how might you optimize
configuration management in your environment based on NSX capabilities?
How might software-defined networking and security
simplify configuration drift detection and remediation?
For incidents, what concerns you about troubleshooting a software-defined networking and
security environment during a high pressure incident
related situation in your current environment?
This is a key area to think about because this often
becomes one of the hurdles to any new technology.
People understand exactly how to troubleshoot if there's a problem today.
Bringing a new technology,
same troubleshooting processes don't necessarily apply.
And so, now we're thinking, ''Wait a minute,
I don't know if I want this new technology because I'm really
comfortable if something happens today,
high pressure situation, I know how to get in and fix something.''
Bringing in a new technology high pressure situation,
if I don't know how to fix it,
all eyes are on me to try and fix it.
But you have to think about this as part of the engineering effort,
as part of the operations effort and certainly as part of
the people transformation when it comes to educating and learning.
Capacity. How might software-defined networking and
security ease your capacity challenges?
And then finally, for provisioning.
Are your customers satisfied with how long it takes you to provision workloads?
Are the different business units within your organization
satisfied with the time to market for a new application that they've requested?
What other innovative activities could you undertake if
resources were freed up by automating your provisioning?