The decision to move to the hybrid cloud is a no-brainer. The primary concern is how best to manage the complexity of it all. This is where hybrid cloud management tools come in. The role of hybrid cloud management is to streamline and unify the disjointed applications and services in a hybrid cloud. A hybrid management tool enables you to orchestrate and control all your assets from a single user interface (UI).
So, what are some of the features you should look out for in hybrid cloud management software?
1. Centralized Management and Reporting
Visibility is a huge problem with hybrid clouds. The right tools should deliver extensive management capabilities to IT admins. They should be able to perform a myriad of actions from a single interface. This includes visualizing consumption patterns, identifying underutilized resources, and other functions. The single interface should communicate with disparate technologies and provide a unified view of activities across all your hybrid environments.
2. Self Service and User Empowerment
Hybrid cloud management tools should give teams or departments the power to procure what they need from the system. They shouldn’t have to seek approval from IT. This empowers end users to access whatever they need to do their jobs without friction.
3. Manage and Control Costs
The costs of running a hybrid cloud can spiral out of control if they’re not well-managed. The right management tool should give you cost visibility across the public clouds in your hybrid deployment. Tracking cloud spend manually can be a painstaking task, and you’re likely to miss out on critical information. Some tools allow you to compare costs between private and public cloud resources so you can optimize your operations.
4. Works with Disparate Technologies
Vendor lock-in can be a problem in a hybrid setup. You want to be free to access as many vendor-specific features as you can without using multiple user interfaces. Hybrid management tools should let you interface with disparate technologies on the back end. This allows you to plug into a myriad of public cloud providers without having to retrain users.
5. Future-Proof Integration
Innovation in the public cloud is moving fast. Keeping up can be a problem, especially for organizations that are still running legacy data centers. To keep up, you need a hybrid cloud management tool that can plug into just about any system. Public cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), OpenStack, and Rackspace, are constantly churning out new products and services. You want a tool that enables you to harness this innovation while still being able to interface with legacy technology.
6. Compliance
The hybrid cloud is a very unstructured environment. You have tons of data architectures, payment models, deployment styles, and reporting tools. IT managers normally find it hard getting a single view of compliance and performance. Hybrid cloud management tools can find, collect, standardize, aggregate, process, and analyze performance and compliance data from across the enterprise. This makes it easier to deal with audits.
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