Cisco Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Business Getting Started Guide

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At-A-Glance

The relationship you build with customers by the hosting of all or a portion of their
data centers helps you build closer relationships and develop additional business
opportunities. It offers an excellent way to prove your reliability and demonstrate that
you’re willing and able to go beyond what is required to support your customers. With
Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Providers, the differentiated services that you can offer your
customers can secure your role as a trusted technology partner who understands your
customers’ critical business needs.

Aggregate Cloud Services from Other Providers So You Can Be the Single Point of
Contact for Your Customers
Customers may want to use not only your cloud, but also those offered by other cloud
providers. For example, regulatory oversight may require them to use a cloud within
a particular country. One provider may specialize in their industry. Or they may simply
like a given provider. You can offer your customers access to one, two, or more public
clouds by configuring Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Providers to support these hybrid
cloud deployments transparently, letting you become a cloud aggregator for your
customers and serve as their single point of contact for cloud services. This gives you
another way to differentiate your service from your competitors (Figure 2).

Use Cases

Cisco Intercloud Fabric for Providers use cases include the following:
• Capacity Augmentation: For example a retailer may need more capacity during

peak shopping seasons, and a company may need more computing power to
generate quarterly reports. Customers may also need more capacity when their
contact centers are handling peak numbers of calls or they’re opening new facilities
that strain their existing data centers. It’s critical that the capacity they add be
indistinguishable from what their own data centers already provide. In this hybrid
cloud, the public and private merge transparently both in the way that employees
can use the additional resources and in the customer’s management of IT.

• Development and Testing: A customer’s encapsulated data center in your public

cloud is an excellent place to test and develop new software. The development and
testing don’t use data center resources that the company needs for day-to-day
operations. When testing is completed, the software is ready to move into regular
operations because it has been tested in the same environment in which it will run.

• Disaster Recovery: If disaster strikes, customers will benefit from a transparent

extension of their on-premises data centers in your public cloud. They will have
copies of their applications and their basic data center configurations. Customers
can regenerate their policies and rules, recover much of their data, and continue to
work even if the primary data center is down.

Figure 2. Become a Cloud Aggregator

In Country

Provider Cloud

Backup

Hosted

Security