Role based access case study

Use Case: How to turn your IT organization into an internal broker of cloud services.

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Needs

IT Managers: want to enable their organization to innovate quicker. But need to implement the proper controls and policies to prevent zombie instances, high costs, wasted money, and potential security threats.

Engineers: want on-demand access to major public and private clouds for streamlined development and accelerated innovation.

Solution

The Mist platform makes it easy to enable self-service using heterogeneous infrastructure. Users can serve themselves by giving them the ability to take actions on machines through pre-defined jobs, scripts, and automated workflows - accelerating innovation, streamlining development, and reducing "shadow IT".

How it works

This section provides an overview for how to use the Mist platform for this use case.
For detailed implementation details, visit our documentation section.

Step 1:

Create an 'Organization'

A Mist account can have many Organizations. Think of an Organization as a business unit or department.

Step 2:

Add 'Clouds'

Clouds are public or private cloud providers, containers, hypervisors, and/or bare metal devices. Mist supports more than 15+ service providers and technologies.

Step 3:

Create a 'Team'

A Team consists of Members and a Policy. An Organization can have many Teams.

Step 4:

Invite 'Members' to join a Team

The Member will receive an email asking them to join a specific team. Members can belong to more than one team.

Step 5:

Create 'Rules' for the Team.

Members inherit access controls of a Team.

In the example on the right, any Member of the 'Software Dev' Team has permission to create, destroy, and run scripts in the EC2 Tokyo Region and EC2 N. California Region and 'Read' only access to the VMware private cloud. Rules can be applied to public and private clouds, bare-metal devices, and even containers.

Step 6:

Use the 'Script' section to add scripts

Permissions can be applied to Scripts. A user can select a script to run when provisioning a virtual server. After a server is provisioned a script can automatically install and configure software to streamline the setup process.

Step 7:

Orchestrate

Use the template section to execute a template for provisioning complex topologies and applications. The example on the right shows single-click Kubernetes cluster deployments.

Step 8:

Use Insights

Usage and cost reporting are available in Insights section. Virtual servers, bare-metal devices, and containers can be tagged enabling fine-grain cost and usage analysis across heterogeneous infrastructure.

Conclusion

The Mist platform can help turn your IT organization into an internal broker of cloud services. By using RBAC to create user accounts and set access rights across public and private clouds, users can serve themselves through pre-defined jobs, scripts, and automated workflows.

To test the Mist platform, simply sign up for a free trial. If you would like to run Mist on premises or to learn about call us: +1-650-605-3299, or send us an email: sales@mist.io.