Why Does Cloud Management Matter to Any Organization?

Cloud computing is definitely getting some attention in 2010.

Tons of investment is going into cloud computing infrastructure. Rumors say that Amazon Web Services is a $500,000,000 business. Microsoft, Google, and other players are investing vast sums to their solutions.

Deploying instances is getting easier which makes cloud management even harder.

In essence, cloud management involves the entire task of managing, provisioning and monitoring applications into these infrastructure for the cloud. It is more than just monitoring the server usage. In order to achieve this, it needs the right synthesis of cloud management software and people.

People -- Although cloud computing makes it much easier to provision infrastructure, organizations still need system administration skills to deploy, manage and monitor the systems. If limited resources are available, they should use a Platform as a Service offering like Force.com.

A mature technology platform has both systems administrators and developers. While there's a lot of overlap in the more common skills of each, we've rarely encountered good system administrators make good programmers. It is a rare instance that good programmers can become good system administrators. The cloud has a bad habit of misleading programmers into thinking they no longer need system administrators.

The programmer is competent with technology and fully capable of setting up a system that can support the application being built. The programmer, however, lacks a detailed understanding of ongoing infrastructure management. Consequently, the programmer-managed infrastructure ultimately leads to an environment incapable of adjusting to changing demands and potentially opens vulnerabilities to hackers through discreet channels.

The reverse is true of the system administrators who fancy themselves programmers. They can craft Perl programs to do just about any task. Those programs, however, ultimately lack the solid architecture that programming skills provide.

Software -- Just like servers, storage and networks in your own data center require management tools, so does your cloud infrastructure. Because of the new paradigm of computing, additional controls and management capabilities are needed through cloud management software to:

* Make the underlying cloud easier to use * Extend security policies into the cloud environment * Protect from single cloud vendor lock-in to allow cross cloud operations and migration * Mange to your service level requirements * Provide for financial controls and tracking * Audit and report for compliance

Some cloud computing clients recently described cloud infrastructure as a "developer's dream, but an enterprise application and resources a manager's nightmare."

Any good cloud management software will take care of these challenges, provide the desired features, and ever more value to complex IT environments.

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