Cloud Identity and VDC services
January 3, 2012
Cloud Computing is now a maturing field with a number of sub-topics that make up its structure, and smart Cloud Providers can use these as building blocks for their service offerings, combining them through consultative selling techniques to deliver the ideal client solutions.
For example the core building blocks include ‘Cloud Identity’ as well as virtualization, and an excellent description of how they can be combined is this case study from BT of Norfolk County Council…
Supporting nearly 110,000 children and young people at all stages of their development, Norfolk County Council Children’s Services works with 450 schools across Norfolk. It also provides ICT services to those schools, and began to experience these types of business issues:
- An expensive-to-support architecture
- Maintaining local expertise was a constant problem
- Lack of communication between different systems
In particular they focused on how this fragmentation manifest itself in key areas like how children and staff had to log on anew to every single application they wanted to use. Not only is this tiresome for the users but the spread of different usernames and passwords increases security and compliance risks.
So they engaged BT to tackle these through moving them to the Cloud, specifically their VDC (Virtual Data-Centre) services. This simplified and reduced how much IT infrastructure they have to manage, decreasing their TCO accordingly, and it also make managing the work easier – They can now turn on and off the apps they need.
Additionally they highlight that as part of this centralization of applications they also implemented a ‘Cloud SSO’ feature – Single sign-on.
The executive sponsor for the project is quoted that achieving integration of applications through this single sign-on capability was a key selling feature of the implementation.