Cloud Orchestration Empowering People as a Service

What we do

We help Manage, Secure & Protect the Hybrid-Cloud.

Our mission is Cloud Orchestration Empowering People as-a-Service. This is accomplished via a Unified Management Portal powered by World-Class technology.

Cloud Orchestration Empowering People as a Service

Cloud Orchestration

· Leverage automated discovery to provide 100% transactional and resource visibility and security across public and private clouds

· Aggregate disparate services to provide seamless management of multiple platforms, technologies, services and suppliers.

· Enforce best practice and govern the Cloud in a secure & optimal way

Empowering People

· Streamline the provisioning of Cloud resources

· Enforce best practice while enabling a self-service model

· Sitting in the Control Plane it encompasses the Technical Layer through to Business Layer

· A seamless user experience across all platforms and suppliers

· Enhanced responsiveness to change and higher service-levels

as a Service

· Commercially delivered in the same way Cloud resources are consumed

· Priced by the month based on the size of the estate

· Immediate Cloud cost and OpEx reduction with enhanced service quality:

o Zero Upfront Investment

o In Month ROI circa 35% Average Cost Savings

o Start with a free Cloud Audit

This unique approach provides tremendous benefit for the following:

· Enterprises moving to a Cloud-First Strategy

· SaaS organisations seeking competitive advantage

· Cloud Service Providers offering incredible value without up-front investment

· IoT Integrators looking to bring legacy IT, OT and the Cloud into unified management

Moreover, when speaking with C-suite executives they understand the tremendous opportunity a Multi-Cloud strategy presents in workforce collaboration, service excellence, on-demand scalability, responsiveness to changing business requirements and of course cost savings.

However, a Multi-Cloud strategy also brings some tough challenges stemming from the elastic and borderless infrastructure inherent with the Cloud.

The biggest challenges we help address are as follows:

· How to achieve 100% Visibility across the Private and Public Clouds?

· How can you measure & control asset utilisation to achieve Multi-Cloud Optimisation?

· How to Slash Cloud Cost and avoid Bill Shock?

· How do you optimally provision workloads in the Cloud within Enterprise constraints?

· How do you maintain continuous Governance & Compliance?

· How do you Secure your critical assets in an Elastic Perimeter?

Cloud Orchestration, to address the above, comprises three core areas: Manage, Secure and Protect.

Manage

Manage the Hybrid-Cloud with the Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to gain 100% visibility and agnostic multi-cloud management into your infrastructure and applications. Unified orchestration meets the needs of Developers, Operations, and Business stakeholders. Automate optimised resource provisioning, threat intelligence, backup & disaster recovery to any Cloud environment from a single User Interface (UI) using our self-serve SaaS Unified Management Platform.

The CMP is powered by Gartner Magic Quadrant world-class technology from Morpheus Data - we've enhanced this powerful capability with a Unified Management Portal - a customisable GUI to enable Self-Service at the Business level.

You see, as powerful as the Morpheus Data technology is, it has been built for System Admin and IT Operations experts and not for Business experts - we've solved this.

The CMP is multi-tenanted and clients have the ability to bespoke their UI with their logos and colour palettes. This gives us the ability to create a unique UX regardless of the individual role or responsibility.

Here are some of the benefits in using this approach:

Discover

· Get 100% visibility gaining a consolidated view of your on-premise and cloud environments

· Support for bare metal, multiple hypervisors and container orchestration

· Control public cloud costs and data governance

Optimise

· Enhance cost/performance ratios of your cloud infrastructure

· Gain intelligence on usage, utilisation and costs

· Easily right size over-provisioned infrastructure

· Automatically shut down resources through periods of inactivity

· Build historical usage information

· Right-size & shut down instances when not in use via Recommendation Engine

Manage

· Accelerate application modernisation and developer workflow

· Enable faster self-serve resource provisioning to any environment

· User & Role-based policy control governing functionality access & budget control

· Allocate and manage budget vs spend eliminating bill-shock

Protect

· Enforce a consistent backup and disaster recovery policy

· Optimise any legacy backup systems

· Ensure best-practice in the most dynamic and complex environments

· Consider extending to the ClearSky Protect capability

Secure

· Enforce security best practice automatically at the time of provisioning

· Ensure compliance and service security

· Consider extending to the ClearSky Secure capability:

o the world's first Cyber-Security Data Lake

o Active Cyber Risk Management achieving NIST 4 compliance

Supported Cloud Types

· Alibaba Cloud

· Amazon

· Azure (Public)

· Azure Stack (Private)

· Cloud Foundry

· Dell (Cloud type for PXE and manually added Dell EMC Hosts)

· DigitalOcean

· Google Cloud

· HPE (Cloud type for PXE and manually added HPE Hosts)

· HPE OneView

· Huawei

· Hyper-V

· IBM Cloud

· IBM Cloud Platform

· Kubernetes

· MacStadium

· Morpheus (Generic Cloud type for PXE/Bare Metal and manually added Hosts)

· Nutanix

· Open Telekom Cloud

· OpenStack

· Oracle Public Cloud

· Oracle VM

· Platform 9

· SCVMM

· SoftLayer

· Supermicro (Cloud type for PXE and manually added Supermicro Hosts)

· UCS

· UpCloud

· VMWare ESXi

· VMware Fusion

· VMWare on AWS

· VMware vCenter

· VMware vCloud Air

· VMware vCloud Director

· XenServer

Billing

Visibility

· Achieve full visibility and control over your entire public cloud and private cloud estate

· Gain insights and enforce financial best practices

· Prevent Bill Shock as billing is constantly monitored and rationalised

· Multi-currency support enables financial comparisons and tracking across regions

Rolling Monthly vs Reserved Instance

· Shut down memory and compute on idle workloads whenever possible

· Right-size over provisioned workloads

· Recommendation Engine provides optimal service workload levels

Right-size Virtual Machines

· ONLY provision for what is needed today

Cost Normalisation

· Normalise the pricing between public and private clouds

· Create tee-shirt size VMs that mirror public cloud instances

· Dynamically compare price/performance across your hybrid cloud estate

· Consolidated Monthly Invoice

Secure

ClearSky Cloud offers the world's first purpose-built security data-lake powered by Prismo Systems. This revolutionary approach:

· Real-time monitoring and visibility of 100% of Transactions 100% of the time

· Continuously exposes blind spots

· Actively reduces the attack surface to control Inherent Risk

· Amplifies MITRE tactics to contain Imminent Risk

· The first security platform to provide actionable and automated cyber risk management at enterprise scale

Adopters report 70% cost savings as opposed to using traditional multi-layered approaches to mitigate rogue activity on the network. The transactional data model and data lake fundamentally transform how security telemetry is collected, analysed and stored.

Enterprises realise unprecedented visibility, accuracy and control along with lower costs, operational efficiency and risk-centric governance.

Leave Correlation (best-guess) behind and move into enforcing zero-trust using Causation (trust-chain) to eliminate false-positives.

Active Cyber-Risk Management

Continuous risk assessment

· Event-driven discovery of users, assets and transactions

· Assess risk and expose blind spots.

· Highlight configuration drift in CMDB, AD, DNS

· Minimize attack surface:

· Combine real-time activity with configuration to discover risks and enforce controls

· Discover vulnerabilities using CVE and Microsoft KB

· Delete unused accounts

· Policies protect until patched​

Excess privileges and misconfiguration

· Validate user identity with local accounts to halt lateral movement

· Identify suspicious behaviour for users, networks and data access

· Pinpoint human oversight and errors.

Prevent Malware from installing

· Provenance policies block advanced Malware, including Ransomware

· Block Malware and Ransomware at install attempt

Assure NIST4 Compliance with Next-Gen GRC

· Map controls to NIST framework

· Risk Registry, persona specific active dashboards for:

· C-suite

· Architects

· Analysts

· Detailed 3 to 7-year audit trail in the data lake

Lockdown Servers & Workloads

Defend critical applications, tools and workflows against software supply chain attacks. Secure enterprise crown jewels located on-premise and in public clouds running Linux, Windows or Containers across the entire server lifecycle.

Certified Provisioning

· Validate golden image with CIS hardened configuration

· Authorize software installs, updates and patches from sanctioned channels

· Return server to versioned state

· Provenance policies automatically block unsanctioned executables at install

Integrity of Operations

· Discover and fingerprint scripts, tools and workflows

· Detect and block backdoors and other compromises in trusted channels

· Bubble wrap servers and workloads until they are patched

Least-Privilege during Maintenance

· No standing access to production

· Just-in-Time certificates for break glass

· Rich transaction context and granular control of admins and DevOps ​

Micro-Segment Execution

· Continuous discovery and profiling auto-segments network and system behaviours

· Minimize human error via Intent-based policies

· Recommendation engine

· What-if and dry-run

Protect

ClearSky's Cloud Management Platform is integrated with Veeam Cloud Connect technology offering an easy and cost-effective cloud solution for your offsite backup and archiving needs. ​ Get physical and virtual backups off-site and replicate VMs (virtual machines) without the cost and complexity of building and maintaining an off-site infrastructure. Veeam® Cloud Connect provides a fully integrated, fast and secure way to backup and replicate to a service provider's cloud repository.

Backup Flexibility

· Protect your data and storage wherever it resides – SaaS, cloud, virtual or physical

Near-zero RPO’s and RTO’s

· Implement a confident DR strategy including verified protection for critical assets

Gain Instant Recovery

· Gain Instant Recovery

· Keep availability high

· Instant recovery of your workloads

Protect Everything. Recover Fast

· Intelligent application, file, virtual server and NAS backup ensures no data is lost

The API Framework

Through discussions with CIO’s, CTO’s and large service providers, we have identified that although the toolsets we use are rich with features and functions, the consequence of this is complexity. There is a desire for a much lighter weight UI with enhanced UX, combining the desired output of multiple products into a single pane of glass.

All the products we use for the administrative control plane present an API which enables us to capture the pertinent intelligence and present it in a purpose-built admin UI.

Built in a Kubernetes cluster in AWS, each webserver can now not only be tailored from a logo and branding perspective, but clients can now choose their own URL with SSL certificates.

We also have the ability to change the provisioning workflow so users can now build on geographical location, for example, as opposed to Cloud type.

Again, our choice to partner with a hyper-scale public Cloud provider enables us to scale these webservers vertically and horizontally to 100’s of thousands, and we can resolve the API call against any tenant or group in the administrative construct.

Summary

Our vision of how the IT industry will look moving forward includes:

· Information technology will be delivered as a service

· Individual lines of business will self-serve

· Apart from data classification, sovereignty and latency – location becomes largely irrelevant

· Mid to large enterprises are likely to be managing hybrid Multi-Cloud estates

· Traditional appliances will be delivered as virtual images from a central library

· You will only pay for what you consume​

· IoT will connect everything of value

If you share our ‘everything as a service’ strategy, then you are ready for a New Breed of Technology Partner.

Cloud Orchestration Empowering People as a Service enables IT departments and Service Providers to build consistent policies around image builds, security, governance, cost control and data protection while empowering line of business self-service.

Moreover, optimal governance of the Hybrid-Cloud maximises Cost/Service ratios and the proven savings in OpEx more than pay for this capability – an ROI measured in days not years.