Research completed by 451 Research on behalf of Embotics suggests an increased use of third-party clouds and notes ‘Amazon + 1’ is turning out to be ‘the CIO’s organizing principle.’ Managing the now typically multi-cloud environments in a business efficiently is making cloud management platforms more and more necessary.
Surveying 166 US-based enterprise IT organizations with regard to use of cloud infrastructure as well as the automation and management of associated processes and technologies, 451 Research observed five significant conclusions:
Cloud management platforms enable data-driven decision-making, and while many businesses are wrestling with virtualization and consolidation, cloud management platforms enable an incremental transformation from virtualization to automation and orchestration. Cloud management platforms also support fixed-term and dynamic sourcing, thus providing planned and unplanned options, and typically fewer difficulties are encountered regarding contract complexity and vendor management. Providing ease of use and access options, cloud management platforms also support a combination of old- and new-style IT services, and automation is found to improve user satisfaction without any requirements to raise staff levels.
It is, of course, always a balancing act, and cloud management platforms have to calculate and manage the needs of different stakeholders, including the business, IT and developers. It’s also necessary for organizations to have both the maturity and political will to make the changes required to drive cloud management platform adoption throughout, and the end-user IT literacy levels within must be carefully considered. Regarding dealings with cloud Service Providers and cloud management platform providers, SLAs and agreements need to be devised concerning relationships, responsibilities, and customization work to ensure that what’s expected by the organization is in fact what will be delivered.
Cloud adoption is accelerating and with it the demand for services able to navigate the journey and manage the transformation. Not only assisting in these complex IT revolutions, as well as virtualization and consolation, automation and orchestration, cloud management platforms can aid users struggling to manage VM sprawl. They further assist users in the application of cloud decision criteria to locate, access and employ cloud applications and services through criteria such as cost, compliance, utility, governance and auditability with rules applied to every application. And of further consequence, policy-based cloud management platforms allow for less time devoted to compliance issues when selecting multiple individual services and instead move the focus to more strategic risk assessments in the selection of federated services. For cloud services that are secure, well priced, offering optimal performance, and supporting the needs of various user groups, more and more organizations find that cloud management platforms are necessary to automate and orchestrate processes and ensure business goals are met.
By Jennifer Klostermann
