Cloud Management Platform Briefing Paper
Business Brief
Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are a suite of products used to control various private, public and hybrid cloud environments. The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) and Gartner define requirements and capabilities for a product to be classified as a CMP. These requirements state that the set of features should include: service management, resource management, financial management, general services and governance and security.
CMPs provide IT organisations with a variety of benefits. Common benefits across the majority of CMP solutions are: IT efficiency improvements (for staff, infrastructure and application delivery), risk reduction, cost reduction and work flexibility. Additional benefits offered by some CMPs are: configuration support (for network and storage), service governors that assist with resource management, enhanced monitoring and more.
Technical Brief
A CMP is an organizations way of managing the various cloud environments used. CMPs oversee the cloud environments and help optimize the resources being used in the cloud. In addition, CMPs are represented by four central capabilities known as: general services, service management, resource management and financial management.
General services refer to self-service options and analytics that can generate information on aspects such as resource consumption in the cloud. Service management allows an organization to better manage their resources, planning and respond to service requests. Resource management refers to the CMP’s capabilities to manage applications, servers, storage and networks whilst delivering services. Financial management helps track cloud resource consumption, metering, cost allocation, forecasting/predictive analytics and reporting.
Industry Use
Cloud management platforms help tackle the problems associated with managing multiple cloud environments. Internet and software industries use CMPs to allocate resources, determine consumption, and improve security and more.
Most industries are becoming IT focused and integrating cloud tools in some way. Once industries introduce the cloud, they look to integrate CMP tools into their industry as well. The exact CMP options are dependent on the vendor, but they all essentially help with management and deployment of cloud environments.
Most industries using CMPs purchase it from third party vendors. Some of the most popular cloud management platforms being used by industries are: Cisco CloudCenter, BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management, Morpheus and IBM Cloud Orchestrator. These CMPs are helping various organizations across many industries automate cloud tools provisioning, integrate service management, manage their cloud environment (i.e., cloud resource consumption, monitoring etc.,), security and more.
Canadian Government Use
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Implications for Departments
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