Picking the right hybrid cloud management platform

Gartner defines a hybrid cloud management platform as the ability of an organization to manage its infrastructure deployments and services either on- or off-premises in the cloud. Over the years, technology has enabled organizations to invest in more tools that allow them to bring their workloads to the cloud.

The hybrid cloud was designed to specifically cater to organizations that needed to have a presence both on-premises and on the cloud. However, when deploying workloads onto the cloud, the biggest challenge most businesses face is how they can manage it. A hybrid cloud management platform can not only help organizations design, deploy, and manage IT infrastructure and services across clouds, but also on data centers, containers, virtual machines (VMs), and hardware platforms.

The hybrid cloud management platform is implemented through software that integrates on- and off-premises infrastructure into a management platform that allows administrators to view and control resources. Some examples of technology vendors that offer hybrid cloud management platforms include IBM, VMware, Thales, Morpheus Data, and Cloudian.

This article explores the hybrid cloud management platform providers and the features they offer that organizations can consider in their hybrid cloud journey.

IBM

The mainframe remains a key component for organizations today, especially those dealing with sensitive data and requiring high compute power, like the financial services industry. However, with the cloud promising more capabilities, businesses want to leverage the cloud capabilities but still rely on the mainframe.

IBM’s zSystems allow organizations to seamlessly integrate into the hybrid cloud by providing agility and flexibility with AI-driven insights, security, resiliency, and scale. The IBM z16, which was unveiled last year, is now enabling organizations, especially those in the financial industry, to embrace modernization with minimal complexities.

Simply put, the IBM z16 brings AI and cyber resiliency into the hybrid cloud by using innovative on-chip AI inferencing and quantum-safe technologies. It can accelerate decision velocity and provide the agility needed for businesses to move forward. It is also the world’s first system with computing power and intelligent infrastructure to prevent fraud in real-time at scale.

VMware

For VMware, one strategy of the hybrid cloud management platforms needs to support the modernization of legacy applications and the containerization of apps for Kubernetes deployment. Containers are a much more efficient means of virtualization than previous generations and accord with best practices in DevOps teams.

VMware also provides management for the multi-cloud environment. VMware Aria is a multi-cloud management portfolio that provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and applications. Expressly designed for the operational challenges of cloud-native applications and public cloud environments, VMware Aria delivers a wholly new perspective on multi-cloud management.

Thales

Thales believes that the growth in hybrid cloud platforms will require more powerful and important tools. Organizations are aware that finding a single system to cater to their cloud management requirements is not easy. Hence, they would need multiple tools to create a unified system.

The two main types of hybrid cloud management software are proprietary and open source. Thales’s Sentinel EMS enables organizations to manage software licenses and entitlements in a wide range of environments, including hybrid cloud security deployment. The product solution suite provides enterprises and organizations with the opportunity to create custom packages for customers to meet licensing and distribution needs, integrated with the cloud in a variety of capacities.

Morpheus Data

Morpheus Data believes that cloud management has evolved and that many solutions are still trying to solve yesterday’s problems instead of focusing on the present and the future. Designed by DevOps pros, the team at Morpheus Data combined the industry’s best cloud management with open container orchestration and powerful infrastructure automation.

The result is a hybrid cloud management platform that eliminates tool sprawl and covers use cases across many functional areas. These five areas include building and managing a hybrid cloud platform, the ability to consume hybrid cloud via self-service, assuring hybrid cloud governance and control, automating hybrid cloud apps and infrastructure, and optimizing hybrid cloud costs.

Cloudian

Hybrid cloud management is complex. Beyond the technical aspects that are involved, it requires an in-depth understanding of security, governance, and end-user requirements. This is why Cloudian believes hybrid cloud management is a discipline, but it is almost always practiced with specialized cloud management tools.

There are four popular hybrid cloud management solutions – OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, ManageIQ, and Cloudify. Cloudian HyperStore is a scalable, on-premise object storage platform with a 100% S3 native API. Organizations can easily manage data in public and private storage and can be integrated with a variety of cloud and third-party services, including migration services. HyperStore also enables organizations to automatically verify and encrypt data and can facilitate search and analytics by using custom metadata tags.

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