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SOLUTION BRIEF
CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms
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CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms
Challenge
IT is under great pressure to reduce operational costs and demonstrate value in the services it delivers.
These pressures are often a result of a disconnect between what IT provides and the perception of delivery from their business users, and fulfillment of service requests that are costly, labor intensive, and prone to errors. In addition, companies often have no visibility into service costs, consumption, and performance in financial terms. Furthermore, IT is looking for ways to implement services in a cost effective manner with reduced time to market and greater agility.
Opportunity
CA Service Catalog is designed to enable you to publish a top-down-oriented service catalog for virtual desktops on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms that provide a 360-degree view of offerings and helps remove the disconnect between what IT provides and the perception of what is delivered to the business. CA Service Catalog allows your IT organization to set expectations, replace costly and labor-intensive methods, and provide these services in a private cloud environment using Vblock Infrastructure Platforms. In addition, you can manage service costs and consumption and provide visibility into service usage in financial terms, not operational metrics.
CA Process Automation gives you the ability to automate the entire delivery process once a request has been made through CA Service Catalog. Using CA Process Automation on Vblock Platforms, you can automate the entire approval process required to provision a new virtual desktop so that every step is audited to enable compliance.
Benefits
CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation on Vblock Platforms together comprise the CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms and enable your IT organization to document and increase value by communicating your service offerings for virtual desktops in rich, descriptive business language in a centralized service catalog. The solution aids in cost reduction by understanding the value of services consumed in financial terms, and providing these services on an integrated infrastructure designed to significantly reduce implementation times, risk and cost. With CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms, you can automate the delivery of cloud and virtualized services from request to approval to fulfillment processes, and speed time-to-service provisioning, accelerating the journey to virtualization and a cloud computing environment.
executive summary
Key Operational Challenges
IT is under great pressure to reduce operational costs and demonstrate value in the services it delivers
IT organizations are often challenged from the perspective they are seen as a cost center, one that reacts to “break fix” types of issues. This is exacerbated by the degree and quantity of service requests that tax resources and cause user frustration. In addition, IT has no visibility into the cost of its service operations, meeting service levels, or setting expectations. As a result, IT is not empowered to become a strategic partner to the business.
Service request fulfillment is costly, labor intensive, and prone to errors
IT often fulfills user requests through ad hoc processes. Entry to IT often comes through manual methods, including phone calls and emails, which require additional data entry into the fulfillment and tracking systems. Request approvals are routed, not by established business rules, but by the
experience of the person assigned to the task. Delays and human errors do not just result in issues for the requestor, as this also negatively affects user perception of the IT organization.
In addition, many service requests require provisioning though the manual activities of multiple functional groups. Often, these are uncoordinated and require sequential steps before fulfillment of the service request. Reporting and notification methods are either reactive or nonexistent.
There is no visibility into service costs, consumption, and performance
IT is always looking to reduce costs, but it can be difficult when you do not know where your money is spent. This lack of visibility into the true cost of service operations often results in budget overruns and the inability to secure funding for new business initiatives. The lack of a documented and published catalog of offerings representing the services IT provides to the business results in an increased demand for nonstandard and ad hoc service requests. This unplanned work can be costly and difficult to control.
Transition existing services to the cloud
With increasing demands on IT to deliver efficient services and low cost services, many enterprise organizations are looking to deploy private and hybrid cloud computing environments and transition their existing services on Vblock Platforms. The challenge is that the business of IT still needs to be managed, including meeting customer demand across the enterprise.
The delivery of cloud services, such as provisioning virtual desktops, still requires IT to provide value,
offer transparency of costs, and fulfill requests in a cost effective manner, without increase of labor or
IT resources.
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CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms
Opportunity: Automate and provision virtual desktops to a cloud computing platform
CA Service Catalog is an enterprise-class solution designed to define and publish business and IT services and gain financial insight. CA Service Catalog enables your organization to define its service offerings in business terms, including virtual desktops through Vblock Platforms. These service definitions can include any number of text or graphical descriptions. Services are published throughout the enterprise or to individual business units via permission controls. Native multi-tenancy allows multiple physical catalogs to support a wide variety of provider/consumer business models. CA Service Catalog leverages CA Process Automation which provides a workflow orchestration engine to automate the delivery of services across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Fixed or usage-based pricing can be added with just a couple of mouse clicks to provide financial transparency. A billing engine automatically associates service usage of virtual desktops and other services to departments, cost centers, and customers, and can even send out invoices for cost recovery if desired. And service request Service Level Agreements (SLAs) enable you to set expectations and track service fulfillment
commitments.
CA Service Catalog capabilities
• Define business and IT services in an easy-to-manage web-based service catalog using value-oriented business language
• Create a single point of contact using a familiar shopping cart for all user requests based on role
• Native multi-tenancy maps your enterprise and enables multiple provider/consumer businesses
• More efficient publishing of your catalog using over 200 included best practice service definitions, workflow templates rules, reports, and forms for user data entry
• ITIL® Content Pack includes best practice process documentation and pre-built actionable workflow content for request or service catalog management
• Manage expectations with built-in request SLA service level agreement tracking and reporting
• Speed user requests, validate data, reduce errors, and enable automated tasks with the built-in form designer
• Analyze and present vital information required for effective enterprise IT management with the business intelligence enterprise reporting engine
• Enhanced request automation controls, including assignment and automatic delegation, alleviate
administrative overhead and provide greater flexibility
CA Process Automation capabilities
• Orchestrate provisioning of virtual desktops on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms
• Provides repeatable and extensible automation and orchestration for Vblock Infrastructure Platforms
• Automate routine, time-consuming manual or scripted tasks, including approvals based on business rules and fulfillment activities
• Integrate with a large number of solutions from CA Technologies and third-party tools with
connectors for operating systems, workload managers, systems and network managers, and service desk tools
• Increase IT operational efficiencies across departments and tools
• Enhance the delivery of services and increase user satisfaction through faster time-to-service delivery
• Improve operations through process auditing and tracking
• Control costs by reducing manual and redundant efforts for fulfilling service requests
Figure A
End-user view of
CA Service Catalog
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CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms
Figure B
CA Process Automation
Implementing CA Virtual Desktop Automation on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms
• Provides revolutionary opportunities for standardization and rapid deployment of services, reducing deployment risk and increasing speed of delivery
• Helps to reduce hardware expenditures, administrative setup and maintenance costs
• Creates an elastic and on-demand environment to automatically deliver computing resources when needed
• Enables rapid virtualized desktop deployment, so organizations quickly see a return on investment.
Key benefits delivered
Change IT to a proactive strategic business partner
Together CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation enables you to become a proactive strategic
business partner by communicating your value in terms of services delivered, to meet or exceed
expectations, improving customer relationships, reducing costs, gaining efficiencies, and making better
decisions with financial insight.
Define your value, set expectations, and improve delivery
By publishing your virtual desktop offerings in CA Service Catalog, you create a single point of entry into IT, including a full portfolio of available IT and business services. Business users know exactly what services are offered, the price of the services, and the timeframe for delivery. This sets expectations, enabling increased user satisfaction, and enables IT to define its value to the organization.
Service request SLAs permit the definition and monitoring of virtual desktop and other service fulfillment, from the entering of a service into a shopping cart to the completion of all request tasks.
Your users know the expected timeframe of service delivery before making a request. Built-in request reporting enables your administrators to focus on those request activities that are not meeting commitments, to support continuous improvement of processes and to enable operational excellence.
Help reduce the cost of fulfillment, reduce manual efforts, and alleviate errors
CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation orchestrate your service requests. Process orchestration enables the automation of complex compound or bundled services such as virtual desktops and employee on boarding activities that include touch points to multiple functional groups or external vendors. This helps reduce your manual labor costs, enables parallel tasks, and speeds your ability to provision physical, virtual, and cloud-based services.
Both solutions also enforce business rules and policies, such as approvals and data entry requirements.
For example, service request forms can be pre-populated to reduce errors. Also, automatic routing of a request to the appropriate manager is based on validated user-entered data. Your result is an
enablement of IT governance best practices and also enforcement of business policies over services.
The CA Technologies advantage
CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation on Vblock Platforms provide a comprehensive enterprise-class business solution to define and measure your service offerings. In one solution is everything needed to describe your services in value-oriented language with clearly published SLAs and costs, automate the approval and fulfillment of requests, and associate service usage of virtual desktops in financial terms.
CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms helps you to orchestrate changes across IT,
maximize your investments, control IT spending, drive operational excellence, increase productivity
at lower cost, and align service quality and costs with business objectives accelerating the journey to
private cloud computing.
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CA Virtual Desktop Automation for Vblock Platforms
How do I take the next step to implementing the CA Virtual Desktop Automation for
Vblock Platforms?
By defining and publishing services to users through a CA Service Catalog on Vblock Platforms, enterprises are taking a foundational step in achieving the goal of transitioning from a reactive cost center to a proactive strategic business partner. When IT organizations use CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation to provision virtual desktops on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, they clearly enable the transition between a technical infrastructure and a business service, demonstrating value through transparency to consumers of those services.
For more information about CA Service Catalog, visit ca.com/servicecatalog For more information about CA Process Automation, visit ca.com/itpam
For more information about CA Technologies solutions using Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, visit ca.com/vce
For more information on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms, visit vce.com
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