What is Cloud Management anyway?

Cloud management. It’s a phrase we hear bandied about more and more these days as the great digital transformation and ‘age of automation’ continues to rip through industries of all shapes and sizes.

But what exactly is cloud management? Isn’t it just the same as cloud computing? Well, yes and no, but mostly no – if you catch our drift.

How you manage your cloud is becoming the key to business success, whatever market or industry a business is involved in. Why? Put simply, it means that your IT infrastructure is more efficient, leaner, faster and adaptive to sudden changes. Both good and bad.

Cloud management: a definition of sorts

Once a user of cloud resources and services, you are in the position to consume computing power or storage space from a third party, i.e. a cloud provider. To put things in order, as well as to achieve higher efficiency, you need a way to manage the collection of those cloud resources. Not only that, but the data they maintain, as well as the series of applications executed within that cloud environment.

This calls for the concept we know as cloud management in the industry. And this can be delivered either as professional services, or based on a platform which is backed by an automation toolkit.

Cloud management vs cloud computing

So what’s the difference between cloud management and cloud computing? Put simply, cloud computing is what books are for a library to cloud management. First, the multitude of cloud providers offer the resources and services from their various datacenters. This is so that by using cloud management, a company can tailor cloud environments for running their software for their users.

With that in mind, it’s clear that these two different concepts, cloud management on the one hand, can be complimentary to the other – cloud computing. The result is to gain streamlined operating processes, and a reduction in complexity.

What a good cloud management platform looks like

A cloud management platform should be able to offer self-service and transparency all the way for all cloud resources.

The other key characteristics of a sound cloud management solution are:

• multi-cloud capabilities
• broad network access
• automation in as many repeatable tasks as it is possible to
• cost reports and usage accounting
• easy integration and transition of existing environments

Epilogue

At the end of the day, in the cloud management game what you are looking for is comfort. For a change, this much maligned word (aren’t we always being told to get out of our comfort zones?) is at the heart of what cloud management provides. How? Deeper automation for monitoring all the related aspects of operations and performance, combined with orchestrated IT management workflows.

These are merits that can give the user of a cloud management platform a really comfortable experience. And one which carries unique business values to maintain control and quickly respond to change.