What Are CMPs? Cloud Management Platforms Explained

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are at the center of an exploding market. The cloud is changing the way every business and organization structures its IT and data architectures.

For many businesses, the cloud is a balance of positives and negatives. Sure, there’s cost reduction and availability and vendor-managed infrastructures. But lack of proper governance, compliance, and security remain top concerns for organizations considering more cloud solutions.

CMPs try to bridge this complex state, so you can organize and manage all cloud operations from one place. The best CMPs even solve some problems inherent in the cloud.

Whether you’re taking advantage of SaaS growth or implementing a DBaaS, you need to find a way to create an easy-to-use yet innovative service for your customers. CMPs can help, let’s take a look.

The promise

of the cloud

In large part, enterprises are moving to the cloud to accelerate the delivery of digital services. Staying relevant means that a company must continually provide new value and innovative experiences for customers.

However, businesses often struggle to achieve the benefit of speed when trying to deliver cloud services at scale. Many user interaction models are not optimized for use in the IT organization as a whole.

The promise of cloud solutions is great. However, to work, cloud solutions must solve business problems, not make them worse.

What is a cloud management platform?

Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are software that manage services and resources from multiple clouds. As businesses increasingly move towards using multiple cloud services at the same time, they need a way to manage them conveniently.

Using CMP

helps organizations

with:

Governance
Lifecycle Management
Automating all managed resources in

the cloud

Many other processes that relate to or interact with cloud services

Do you need a CMP? You

may not need a cloud management platform – your current cloud solutions could work perfectly well for your needs! But, cloud infrastructures alone can be quite complicated and often fall short in key areas.

Here are some commonly cited issues

with the cloud: Cloud solutions need

to reduce complexity; they need to be automated in complex environments to provide more value with less work. Cloud solutions
need to better address compliance and governance; these are the main inhibiting factors for adopting a cloud system. Cloud solutions are generally known to lack the compliance and governance components that many organizations require. Failing in terms of compliance and governance can lead to all sorts of problems down the road, something many companies are well aware of.
Cloud solutions must better secure the main benefit most companies are looking for from the cloud: the speed of driving digital innovation. When we can improve digital innovation, we give customers more value.

Therefore, we can summarize the problems with cloud solutions as:

Too complex

Lack of

compliance and governance Lack of
adequate security

How CMPs

work

Modern CMPs extend traditional IT infrastructure. This provides IT with a “variable computing strategy” that dramatically increases the flexibility and speed of digital service delivery. The key is to automate all services in complex environments.

No developer wants to be locked into a subset of the types of infrastructure that may be needed to solve a problem in the optimal way. At a minimum, new clouds must be able to access all physical and virtual infrastructure within an organization

, such as:

Windows, AIX, or mainframe
Hypervisors such as vSphere, KVM, and Hyper-V

Public clouds,

including Azure, AWS, and GCP

If the clouds themselves don’t do this, a good CMP might.

The

capabilities required for cloud management platforms (CMPs) are evolving. As technology continues to become more complex, customers want to take advantage of the flexibility and power provided by new cloud platform options. But customers also want the same cloud platform options to be simple and intuitive for all users.

How is that achieved?

Here are key components of any CMP for you to succeed in the workplace.

Easy to use

Certainly, CMPs can be complicated pieces of software in their own right. A good CMP reduces complexity for end users to get the most out of cloud services.

A CMP should be integrated into a single service delivery source, preferably a formless service delivery catalogue.

Digging deeper, the service request process should be extraordinarily simple for the end user.

Digital innovation initiatives typically focus on delivering more frequent launches of more apps to web and mobile platforms than the end-user experience. By focusing on the end user, your CMP can help generate additional value.

Reduce infrastructure complexity

Good CMPs improve productivity for both developers and administrators. For example:

Infrastructure provisioning is now only a basic capability. The joint fabric of all the different pieces of infrastructure required by complex multi-tier systems must be available to the end user and automated by the CMP.
Supporting containers, such as Cloud Foundry or Docker, means easily provisioning complex environments. This includes databases and middleware servers and automatically scales up or down based on system load.

Productivity trumps all other needs. If a CMP doesn’t improve productivity, it’s not worth using.

Support cloud compliance and governance

The entire infrastructure must be more secure and compliant, not less. This includes cloud and traditional IT properties. In this regard, a CMP can help in four key areas.

Governance for request and change management. For any serious cloud deployment, you need to follow your organization’s processes. Just as there is an approval process for physical infrastructure, there is an approval process for virtual infrastructure.

You need to integrate your cloud environment into your

service management processes; otherwise, your cloud will grow out of control and ultimately be slower and more expensive than traditional systems. How many organizations have been surprised by their public cloud charges? Research shows that organizations are over budget by 23% and expect overspending to rise to 47% very soon.

(Learn more about cloud governance and compliance.)

Effective use of CMDB. All cloud components in a production system must be tracked in the organization’s configuration management database (CMDB). If we can’t maintain the infrastructure and control of the system, we can’t effectively maintain CMPs.

Without these IT processes, managing and troubleshooting around production systems is nearly impossible.

Required compliance of your cloud systems. Even development systems must comply with operational standards. This is a complex issue for many businesses, especially due to a wide range of localization laws and other compliance issues.

Data and intellectual property in a development system are often as important as in production systems. Companies must continually provide new value and innovative experiences for customers to stay competitive while adhering to compliance regulations.

Security best practices. Certainly, there are many aspects of security. Following best practices for patching is particularly necessary in the cloud. Why? More than 80% of attacks exploiting known vulnerabilities and more than 75% of data breaches could be prevented by remedying those issues.

For the raw numbers, there are 11,000 exploitable vulnerabilities in commonly used systems and software. Refining this process will dramatically reduce the risk of cloud security issues.

CMPs

support digital transformation

To achieve the benefits promised by cloud computing, organizations must move beyond the idea of a cloud as a separate entity and instead integrate their cloud and traditional infrastructure

IT teams that combine advanced CMPs with best-practice processes, such as ITSM processes, compliance, monitoring, and configuration management, can lead their organizations as they transform their technology platforms into a competitive weapon.

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