User:Jimoulton/Sandbox

Straight-Through Provisioning describes a highly automated procedure for rapidly providing IT resources to business users. The process eliminates human intervention as far as possible, greatly reducing deployment times. The goal of Straight-Through Provisioning is for humans to only have to deal with approvals, exceptions and the management of an automation framework.

= Origin =

The term is analogous to Straight-Through Processing used to automate Financial Markets transanctions, eliminating the need for human intervention and greatly reducing processing times.

Straight-Through Provisioning processes were originally adopted by the telecoms industry in the early 21st century as a means of rapidly and cheaply delivering IP services to consumers in a highly competitive environment.

= Examples =

Cloud Service Providers are at the forefront of developing truly agile IT infrastructure. Their model is to virtualise and commoditise IT infrastructure which can then be sold to consumers (and, more and more frequently, to enterprises) as a service. Much as in the telecoms industry previously, they must drive down the cost and time taken to deploy these services in order to remain competitive. Straight-Through Provisioning is a key element to enabling agile infrastructure and to them achieving this goal.

= Enterprise Challenges =

Provisioning IT resources to service new business requirements traditionally involves many disparate teams, processes and tools, with significant manual effort and time for coordination e.g. server hardware, storage and networks are procured, installed, and configured by separate teams; space, power and cooling are allocated within the data center; change management, prioritization and authorization requires input from many areas and levels in an enterprise.

With Straight-Through Provisioning, business users or IT planners request services through a Self-Service Portal which triggers a chain of automated and parallelized provisioning activities that are centrally coordinated by an Orchestration layer. Resources from central pools are allocated according to suitability, availability and business priority.

To achieve this the Enterprise must combine the technologies spearheaded by the Cloud Computing vendors, wrappered with well defined workflow systems and granular chargeback mechanisms.

= Enabling Software =

Cloud Management

 * 3Tera's AppLogic provides a GUI allowing users to build a virtual data centre on which to deploy their applications.
 * Enomaly's elastic computing platform is an open source cloud platform that enables centralised management of virtualised environments, including Straight-Through Provisioning of applications.

Workflow Orchestration

 * CA
 * BMC
 * DynamicOps
 * Enigmatic
 * HP
 * IBM
 * Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation

= See also =


 * Computer Orchestration
 * Cloud Computing
 * Autonomic Computing/Autonomic System

=References=