Companies adopt a cloud computing strategy to take advantage of its flexibility, scalability, access to cutting-edge technology, and cost savings. The cloud offers organizations many attractive features, but a cloud infrastructure adds some complexity to managing the environment. The complexity increases if companies choose a hybrid or multi-cloud approach to satisfy their operational requirements and objectives.
Businesses can find it challenging to manage their cloud computing environment efficiently. Inefficient management risks minimizing the potential benefits of the cloud. Companies can improve their operational efficiency by leveraging the capabilities of a cloud management platform (CPM). The right CPM provides features that simplify and streamline cloud management.
What is a Cloud Management Platform?
A cloud management platform is a software solution that helps companies manage their cloud environment. A CMP typically provides a unified interface for managing cloud resources and services across different cloud providers and delivery models. The CMP offers a centralized platform for managing the complex cloud environments that many modern organizations favor. A CMP can be essential in mitigating the challenges of managing cloud resources.
Challenges of Managing Cloud Infrastructure
Organizations face multiple challenges in managing their cloud environments. Companies must address these difficulties effectively to achieve the benefits of cloud computing.
- Cost management – Companies can find it hard to predict the cost of pay-as-you-go cloud resources and services accurately. They may waste money overprovisioning resources to ensure adequate capacity. Some cloud service providers (CSPs) offer complex, tiered pricing models and options that increase the difficulty of tracking the total cost of ownership (TCO).
- Performance monitoring and optimization – Organizations may lack real-time visibility into the health and performance of their cloud resources. Cloud environments are typically too complex to monitor using manual methods. Teams may be unable to detect and address performance issues before they impact the business.
- Security and compliance – Companies are challenged to ensure data security in the cloud. Teams must manage encryption and access controls across a diverse environment. Security may be complicated by confusion regarding the CSPs’ shared responsibility model. Regulatory compliance with standards like HIPAA and GDPR is challenging to meet in complicated, multi-cloud environments.
- Vulnerability management – Organizations must protect their cloud environment in a constantly evolving threat landscape. Technical personnel may need specialized knowledge to secure the infrastructure effectively. Security misconfigurations can result in data breaches that put the business at risk.
- Data governance – A lack of centralized control complicates governance and compliance with organizational polices across a complex cloud environment. Teams must use automated techniques to ensure cloud resources are configured to meet company guidelines and avoid usage, security, or cost violations.
Essential Features of a Cloud Management Platform
A CMP needs several essential features to simplify and streamline cloud resource management. Organizations should look for CMP solutions with the following features and capabilities.
Centralized visibility into cloud environments
Companies need visibility into the complete cloud environment to manage it effectively. An effective CMP must offer support for multi-cloud and hybrid computing environments. Ideally, the platform provides a unified control plane that enables team members to switch between and manage different infrastructure components easily.
Automated resource provisioning and scaling
A CMP should offer automated provisioning to ensure the environment always has sufficient resources to meet operational and business requirements. The tool should allow teams to define policies and workload requirements that trigger resource provisioning or scaling. Environments should be scaled down automatically to avoid overprovisioning and reduce costs.
Monitoring and performance management
CMPs must provide real-time monitoring to verify the status and performance of cloud resources. The tool should generate alerts and notifications when defined thresholds are exceeded. Organizations can optimize the cloud environment with a CMP offering performance analytics.
Cost management and optimization
An effective CMP solution supplies cost tracking and reporting capabilities to provide visibility into where money is spent. The tool should offer forecasting functionality for decision-makers to predict and manage future spending. A CMP can identify overprovisioned and underutilized resources to optimize the environment and reduce costs.
Security and compliance management
CMPs must support security and compliance management to protect data in the cloud environment. The tool should integrate with IAM systems to enforce the authorized use of sensitive resources. Compliance monitoring and auditing are necessary to ensure organizations are meeting standards for regulated data.
Policy management and governance
CMPs offer automated enforcement of corporate policies for items like resource deployment, security, and cost control across the cloud infrastructure. Companies using a CMP can avoid misconfigurations or non-compliance with company policies.
How a Cloud Management Platform Enhances Operational Efficiency
Companies utilizing a cloud management platform enhance operational efficiency in multiple ways.
- Improved visibility – The real-time visibility and monitoring provided by a CMP improve performance and efficiency with proactive alerts that minimize operational disruptions and downtime.
- Automation – Teams can automate provisioning and scaling by defining policies and thresholds to increase or decrease resources like storage or virtual machines. Automation speeds up resource provisioning and frees up IT staff for other tasks.
- Cost management – Companies can increase ROI by continuously optimizing the cloud environment with a CMP. Decision-makers can make informed choices with the cost monitoring, reporting, budgeting, and forecasting tools available in CMPs.
- Stronger security – CMPs offer automated security checks and policy enforcement to ensure systems and data are secure and available to support business operations.
VAST View: A Comprehensive Cloud Management Platform
VAST View is a comprehensive cloud management platform offering customers the features to enhance operational efficiency and optimize their cloud spending. VAST View provides a unified platform to manage on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. The tool supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform public cloud infrastructures.
VAST View helps manage every step of your cloud journey from migration to optimization. The tool can help your company reduce cloud spending by up to 30% and reclaim hundreds of hours of resource management time. You can eliminate shadow IT with complete visibility and proactively address vulnerabilities before they affect the business. Teams can leverage automation to rightsize millions of instances with a single click.
Talk to our team and leverage VAST View’s capabilities to optimize your cloud and enhance operational efficiency.
