NIL Standard Cloud Management

A simplified private cloud

While it is tempting to rely your business on a public cloud, some organizations are not ready, willing or even allowed to move their workloads. Still, they need a robust, scalable, highly automated, and manageable IT infrastructure.

The key challenge is that this is rarely the case. Effective cloud management solutions are typically available as public SaaS bound to provider’s infrastructure (Azure, AWS), and can’t control on-prem assets. Further complications arise from the more or less frequent changes in network topology, when new devices are added/removed or for instance a version upgrade of the network software occurs. These changes often break the orchestration because some of them may not be backward compatible or the updated device software may contain errors. Wouldn’t it be great to have a functional framework for your cloud management platform tailored to your needs?

Benefits of NIL Standard cloud management solution

  • Specialized layers with different responsibilities and mutual independence
  • Organized and functional framework of a large and complex IT structure
  • Mostly automated, consistent, and simplified CMP
  • Integrated, highly-valuable added solution within a predictable timeframe

Strong foundation for a better business

NIL succeeded to integrate, streamline, and modernize traditional, cloud-based infrastructures with standardized configuration management and network automation capabilities that help your organization increase business and IT agility, productivity, and efficiency. NIL Standard cloud management solution is based on off-the-shelf Cloud management platform (CMP) and supplemented with other off-the-shelf automation/orchestration tools. We successfully separated all software components into specialized layers with different responsibilities and mutual independence :

  • Intent-based and interface layer: A process that describes which topology devices must be configured in what way.
  • Topology layer: Description of network layout and topology objects, such as zones, network segments, devices, and endpoints.
  • Functional layer: A layer that discloses the minimum set of functions for a particular family of devices. For example, the firewall function layer can provide functions for managing firewall policies.
  • Device layer:
    • Device-specific function layer (higher level functions are translated to API calls)
    • Low-level API (pure API calls)

In most cases, this architecture keeps all the layers organized and at the same time allows us to react quicker to changes without further human mistakes. Adding a firewall device should be as easy as implementing a new device layer. In essence, a function is an abstraction layer that only reveals high-level functions and leaves low-level implementation details to the device layer. This protects the service level logic from changes at the device level. Similarly, it also prevents the device layers from knowing any details about the service logic.

Cloud trends are pointing towards a way to dramatically speed up IT service delivery and quickly adapt to the ever-changing business needs while using the infrastructure in a more cost-effective way. And this is the same with NIL Standard cloud management solution. Workload within a private cloud can transform a complex topology into an easily-managed ecosystem that is mostly automated, consistent, and simplified to avoid human mistakes.