Infrastructure and operations leaders face a rapidly changing cloud management platform market as they attempt to manage private, public and hybrid cloud services. This research defines the cloud management platform market and provides guidance for acquisition and usage.
Strategic Planning Assumption
Through 2022, less than 30% of cloud workloads supported by cloud management tools will be within private cloud or cloud-inspired environments (on-premises or hosted), versus more than 50% today.
Cloud Management Platform’s typically address service request management; provisioning, orchestration and automation; governance and policy; monitoring and metering; and multi-cloud brokering. Some also provide other functionality, but the five areas mentioned above are typically where most provide capabilities. The key value proposition of a Cloud Management Platform is enabling multi-cloud management to apply policy, and to orchestrate and automate across public and private cloud services in a uniform way. The Representative Vendors table in this research includes a sampling of vendors that offer Cloud Management Platform functionality. The benefits of the Cloud Management Platform are threefold:
- Enforce policies and standards — which provider to use and what can be consumed from that provider.
- Offer a single view and implementation across multiple cloud providers through abstracting cloud providers’ proprietary APIs.
- Reduce lock-in of any one IaaS provider.
These value propositions are weighed against the lock-in of the CMP itself and the restrictions the CMP places on use of IaaS providers to enable this value. In order to enforce policy, most CMPs require that cloud consumers provision through the CMP, rather than directly through native cloud providers’ APIs. This is becoming more unacceptable for many enterprises with developers needing access to these APIs. Some CMPs have responded by lessening the level of abstraction that they provide, leaning more toward tagging to allow visibility within public cloud environments. Some have added reactive governance — the continuous monitoring of the environment for compliance with policies and retroactive enforcement of those policies.
Read the full article HERE