Arjuna Agility™ is a 'federated cloud computing platform' designed to improve IT flexibility by:
Organisations wishing to deploy a 'Private Cloud' face real people-centric barriers to resource sharing which must be overcome. Owners of resources are typically unwilling to relinquish ownership and reluctant to trust users ‘from outside’. Recognizing these issues, Agility provides a controlled way for the enterprise to create and incrementally grow its own 'Private Cloud'. Resource owners retain control by attaching policy to resources they agree to share. These resources are assigned to Agility and policy describes the precise conditions under which a resource can be shared, and by whom. Once assigned and subject to policy, Agility dynamically provisions the resource pool to meet the changing IT demands of the business. In this way, organisations build confidence and trust through utilising cloud computing internally.
Agility enables the organisation to seamlessly extend its 'Private Cloud(s)' to other 'Clouds'. These may be 'Private Clouds' within the same enterprise or 'Private Clouds' inside a partner enterprise (e.g. supply chain) or 'Public Clouds', allowing the organisation to leverage external resources with the associated benefits of cost and scale. Agility delivers all of these advantages through policy-controlled arbitrage.
The diagram above illustrates how Agility federates 'Private Clouds' and 'Public Clouds' for the benefit of the business. The set of IT resources belonging to two departments, A and B, within an enterprise, have each been turned into a 'Private Cloud' by Agility. At the point in time shown, an application ('App1') - which is delivering a critical business service ('service 1') to Department A’s users - has exceeded the capacity of the resources directly managed within Department A. Fortunately, via Agility, Department A’s cloud has created a Service Agreement with Department B which enables 'App1' to utilise resources within Department B's cloud. (Note: This is only possible if both the policy of Department A and the policy of Department B allow it). Department B's policy has also allowed some unused resources to be pre-assigned to 'App1' in case further scale-out is required. Agility has also enabled Department A to create a Service Agreement with a 'Public Cloud' (e.g EC2), which has been utilised in order to host 'App3'. However, Department A also has a Service Agreement with another 'Public Cloud' (e.g. Flexiscale), and, under the control of policy, it may use Flexiscale as an alternative for 'App3' if EC2 fails, or if there are positive cost benefits in doing so.
Agility™ maximises the return on existing IT investment and provides the flexibility and speed of delivery that enterprises need in order to effectively respond to business threats and opportunities as they arise.
