With a goal of the capability of scaling up rapidly and keeping proprietary company information secure, businesses of every size are turning to cloud management. Cloud management offers a way to oversee the organization and administration of public and private cloud, with access to cloud resources when you need them.
In this article, we’ll provide an in-depth look at cloud management, such as how it works and the different types of cloud computing services you can use.
Cloud management refers to the management of a public or private cloud, including an organization’s cloud computing products and services. This includes the infrastructure, resources, and services needed to maximize and secure cloud computing.
Cloud management allows your IT team to control your dynamic and scalable computing environment. Veritas multi-cloud solutions combine several technologies and software products to present a consistent process and cohesive strategy customized for your business. This includes the management and delivery of:
With a cloud management service, your IT team can monitor utilization, make changes, automate processes, and access resources to keep your system running smoothly.
The cloud offers enterprises the ability to lower upfront investments for on-site infrastructure because they can deploy applications to the cloud. Having public cloud environments available for on-demand data storage and computing power gives users access to the rapidly growing and changing need for services and data. By using cloud management, your administrators can monitor activities, such as how the cloud is used and deployed, how data is integrated, and how resources are being used. Cloud management can also help with disaster recovery by backing up IT infrastructure and data to a third-party cloud computing platform.
Now that we know what cloud-based solutions are, let’s explore how cloud management works.
Cloud management is administered using software and tools. To get a better picture of how cloud management works, an enterprise can look at its hybrid IT infrastructure as one complete platform pulling relevant data from all of the traditional on-site systems combined with its cloud-based systems.
IT teams use cloud management platforms to optimize and secure their cloud infrastructure and all the data and applications on it. This allows organizations the ability to set up real-time oversight, manage compliance, and prevent or stop data breaches or cyberattacks.
To make this work, a cloud management system is installed on a specific cloud to gather information on performance and activities. The system sends its analysis to a dashboard on the web displaying the results for administrators. With this information on hand, cloud administrators can make quick decisions and issue commands through the cloud management platform.
Private cloud infrastructure is set up to be used by one company. You can manage your cloud internally or hire a third-party expert. Private cloud systems give a company flexible power and storage throughout the business but can't be operated as a "hands-off" style of management.
Public cloud services are available over a public network. In this case, the cloud infrastructure is created and owned by a private company like Google, Amazon Web Services, Oracle, or Microsoft. This company then allows anyone to purchase or lease computing capacity and data storage when it's needed.
A hybrid cloud environment is made up of a blend of both private and public cloud services from several providers. Companies may want to store proprietary data on the private cloud for security purposes while also having the ability to leverage public cloud apps that are at a lower cost for their standard usage. When you connect the public and private cloud environments, you have a hybrid cloud.
A recent trend is for IT organizations to move more software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) into the cloud. This causes an increased need for cloud management solutions to monitor the cloud-based apps for security and compliance, enable workflow automation, increase quick and accurate decision-making, and implement cost savings.
Cloud application management reduces manual entry and automates regular workflows and tasks throughout your systems. Automation can prevent costly human errors, which can save you time and money. You can automate resource provisioning, maintenance, and business policies with pre-defined rules and permits that you put into place.
Additionally, you can use cloud management software to find and fix problems, create reports, and send notifications to your team without ever having a need to intervene. This not only reduces errors but also improves efficiency.
Through cloud management, your IT team can personalize cloud services for your company's needs. For example, you can create blueprints for your system to follow, which can be as simple as a single app or as complex as a stack of applications.
Traditional organizations create silos of skills that limit growth and training for the company and individual employees. The cloud environment allows for an immersive user interface (UI) that can transfer knowledge and facilitate onboarding. This can speed up building automation and creating IT blueprints.
Cloud management tools make cost monitoring of cloud services easier to predict. Since it's not always simple to discern costs from provider to provider, these tools make it easier to contain costs and understand how you are being charged. Some platforms will even offer suggestions on how to reduce your cloud computing costs.
With all of the complex applications running in the cloud for many organizations, it can become difficult to oversee all of them. Cloud management gives you control and visibility over the entire system, including integrated applications and systems, storage, provisioning, and the security of everything hosted on your cloud.
With control over the cloud, you’ll have the ability to manage the entire ecosystem to ensure effectiveness, resource management, proper compliance, cloud supervision, and cost management. When administering, you can have control and access over the entire enterprise's cloud through an interface you can access anywhere through a secure connection.
One option is to create out-of-the-box (OOTB) content for custom automation using workflows and operations to integrate with technology and software used by your enterprise so it can run more efficiently.
Enterprise-wide compliance is easier to track when you can see all of the configuration items and dependencies. This includes providing information to make better decisions and run IT processes more efficiently.
The future of cloud computing for most businesses will be a combination of public and private cloud solutions. This gives modern organizations the tools to manage multiple clouds while managing capacity and optimizing costs across all cloud systems.
End users can easily browse your catalog created by your IT team and can then request resources through a self-service portal.
Cloud management speeds up the implementation and delivery of cloud applications and infrastructure. When you leverage proven methods and optimize performance, your cloud-based apps can run more effectively.
It's easy to procure cloud services. Although it's convenient, you can run the risk of taking more than you need or can afford. Because your infrastructure is virtual, it can be easy to lose track of how much you're using and whether you need that much capacity.
Using cloud management's comprehensive analytics and granular reporting, your organization can create better forecasts to plan for the amount of infrastructure needed to optimize workload placement, utilization of resources, and acquisition of resources. This helps you manage your cloud capacity without damaging delivery quality for service-level agreements.
You can make sure that all IT services are compliant with company standards and within budget by injecting actions into the fulfillment process. By using these actions, you can configure advanced multi-level approval flows for service requests. You can also create dynamic rules based on use cases and your different users.
Although methods to protect cloud-based resources can vary from company to company, they all follow the concept of shared responsibility. With cloud management, you streamline security oversight for cloud-based services and apps. Your enterprise can maintain compliance with regulations and standards, such as HIPAA, GDPR, CPRA and PCI DSS regulations, along with your own internal data privacy policies.
With cloud management, you can give your developers confidence knowing they're in compliance with the proper regulations and laws.
Like all technology, cloud tech is rapidly evolving and developing in complexity. By using cloud management solutions, you can continue to monitor your cloud usage while not needing a complete education every time something changes.
Cloud management provides an easy-to-use interface, simplifying the overall management of your hybrid cloud platform.
With cloud management, you can have a unified view of the health and use of your infrastructure. Management facilitates automated tracking and the discovery and resolution of problems. Routine decision-making becomes more efficient, as data is available in real-time. Automated policies run capacity, configuration, and resource access.
When building cloud architecture, you can implement environmentally-conscious strategies to ensure your cloud management solution uses limited energy and is cost-efficient.
Cloud management can be an integral tool for your business, and Veritas can help your organization conquer the complexity of managing and protecting your data. Veritas offers everything from Microsoft cloud management to AWS cloud management, so your data will be protected no matter what cloud computing platform you use.