Integrated Cloud Management as easy as 1-2-3

Easynet is a leading managed service provider with over twenty years’ experience delivering integrated networks, hosting and unified communications services to both national and global customers. It offers its expanding customer base the freedom to choose the IT infrastructure options that meet their exacting business requirements. Easynet achieves this by not being aligned to an individual carrier, provider or supplier. It is therefore able to source and integrate services and infrastructure in order to create dynamic, enduring and sustainably competitive networks, hosting and unified communication environments tailored to each customer’s specific need.

Simplified control and management of virtual environments required

“At Easynet, our approach to the cloud is simple – we call it ‘hybrid by design’ – it is based upon fully integrated cloud solutions across private, private shared and public cloud environments,” explains Richard Rustean, Product Engineer at Easynet. “The most appropriate service combination today is unlikely to be the optimum combination available in the future. Our ability to seamlessly deploy new technologies whilst maintaining business agility is crucial to our customers’ ongoing success.”

Offering its customers fully integrated cloud solutions across a mixture of environments from its single Matrix portal, Easynet needed a cloud management platform that could simplify control and management of all virtual environments, whilst causing no disruption to its customers’ day-to-day operations.

Easynet was looking to provide its customers with immediate access to a unified management solution for its multiple cloud environments – offering complete visibility, control and rapid provisioning in a single online application. “When scoping a solution we looked at a number of providers in the market before selecting Abiquo. However, it quickly stood out as offering the optimum solution for the various business challenges we were looking to address,” says Mr Rustean.

A highly scalable and reliable cloud management platform

“Not only did we feel that Abiquo’s strategic roadmap was closely aligned with our own, we liked the fact that its cloud management solution is both software and hardware agnostic, so offers the appropriate level of integration into multiple hypervisors and the broad range of public cloud providers that we required,” comments Mr Rustean. “Added to this, Abiquo has a simple and clear user interface, comprehensive integration options, and a very light footprint.”

Founded in 2006, Abiquo is one of the original pioneers of cloud computing. Designed from the ground-up as a strategic solution to meet the needs of customers, Abiquo was specifically architected to be hardware and hypervisor agnostic. Abiquo’s technology effectively removes the barriers in building, deploying and operating the cloud infrastructure and provides service providers the ability to offer their customers flexibility and a wide breadth of solutions.

Easynet deployed Abiquo’s cloud management platform in only two days, spanning seven nodes across five key regions; UK, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. “The implementation went extremely smoothly and was non-disruptive to our customer base,” says Mr Rustean. “Abiquo’s cloud management platform now sits completely transparently side-by-side on our hypervisors.”

Greater choice and ease of use for customers

The company has seen numerous benefits since moving to Abiquo’s cloud management platform, from streamlining the deployment of new cloud solutions to its customer base, to being able to make available more detailed user audits for customers’ compliance requirements. In addition, it has become more agile by having an increased level of control and management of overall capacity within its cloud environments.

A further benefit was the overarching expertise Abiquo brought to the implementation. “The way Abiquo has engaged with us from the outset of this project was an unexpected advantage. Abiquo’s product roadmap matches our vision of true "hybrid by design" cloud which was extremely useful in evolving our proposition. Abiquo has remained wholly committed to supporting us throughout its own product development cycle,” adds Mr Rustean.

The feedback from Easynet’s customers has been equally positive. “Our customers love the fact that they have just one portal to access all of their services. Now they have the ability to import their own VM (virtual machine) templates, whichever hypervisor they are using, so feel they are retaining valuable control and flexibility,” says Mr Rustean.

“Moving to the Abiquo cloud management platform has enabled Easynet to provide its customers with greater choice and control via a fully integrated management portal. The fact that Easynet plans to extend its use of the Abiquo cloud management platform across more regions and is using it to form the basis of its ‘hybrid by design’ cloud offering, is proof positive of the value that the solution can bring to managed service providers,” comments Ian Finlay, Chief Operating Officer, Abiquo.