Your Operational Readiness Checklist for the Hybrid Cloud

As the owner for delivering enterprise applications and infrastructure services, you have been looking for a management solution that not only delivers on the agility promise of the cloud, but also gives you the control on uptime, performance, compliance and cost.

You are also expected to accomplish the above in a multi-vendor, multi-cloud and heterogeneous environment – inherited from years of mergers and acquisitions or from the needs of avoiding vendor lock-in.

In order to effectively operate and manage a hybrid cloud, you need to place these solution capabilities very high on your checklist:
• Manage across my multi-vendor supplied physical infrastructure.
• Support heterogeneous hypervisor environments.
• Manage my private cloud.
• Manage public clouds, with control over SLAs, compliance and cost.
• Offer developers access to public cloud via self-service, while retaining control.
• Manage both traditional application architectures as well as cloud-native scale-out architectures.
• Offer authorized users control over how they request infrastructure, multi-tier applications, or custom services based on group, role, or policy.

Now, what options do you have to acquire these capabilities? You have:
• Option A: Look for a purpose-built Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that has been designed in the era of virtualization and cloud, to meet the latest expectations of hybrid clouds.
• Option B: Revamp your legacy management tools.
• Option C: Build your own from scratch.

In this paper, we will examine the benefits and design philosophy of option A – a CMP that is purpose built for hybrid cloud, and designed to work in heterogeneous environments.