Cloud Computing is being adopted at a greater pace than smartphones. With its advantages increasing day by day, cloud deployments are increasing. In order to bring efficiency to the work place and reduce redundancy a single point of management is essential for all the cloud services.
In this context Cloud Management Platforms are being adopted. A Cloud Management Platform delivers unified governance over PaaS, IaaS and SaaS workloads both internally and externally. This enables optimised workflow and scheduled maintenance and upgrades. Portability across various workloads and among different clouds can be implemented. This further paves the way for implementation of best cloud providers for all the workloads.
CMP can be beneficial in Cloud based Application development. You can customise the environment and enforce consistency using policies among the application and their development. Policies on Configuration, Security, Management, Lifecycle, Workload, Backup and resource monitoring are some of the policies that can be well implemented using CMP’s.
Risk aversion can be a major advantage of the CMP process. CMP’s when implemented correctly can be a Swiss knife to the cloud technologies. Implementing, organising and deploying different workloads across different cloud providers can be a simple task. However the resource and quotas must be implemented with a greater accuracy to maintain stability and security.
Implementing cloud management platform across various types of clouds is possible, from basic public clouds to complex private and hybrid clouds, CMP’s can be implemented. Thus it is necessary to determine what you need and what you want to achieve through using a CMP. In the end, the security and reliability lies in how it is configured.
Advantages of implementing CMP’s:
- Automation
- Governance
- Backups
- Security
- Portability
- Failover policies
- Easy configuration
- Framing a good deployment strategy
- Understand what your company needs
- Evaluate and test before you deploy
- Choosing the right architecture
- Ensuring security as the fore front goal
- Careful vendor selection
- Backup plan
How to implement a Cloud Management Platform?
Once you are aware of your requirements and company goals you can create an outline of your models for implementing the Cloud management platform. However CMP’s have a failure rate if they are misconfigured. The resources and scheduled quotas will be affected when failover and backup configurations are not balanced. Ultimately it poses a risk as resources are affected and it leaves your workload insecure. The Cloud is puzzle when it comes to security and incorrect implementation can pose a serious threat.
There are a lot of vendors that provide CMP’s at the moment. However not all of them are secure nor reliable. You need to experiment with your requirements before making your deployment on production servers. Make use of their trails and ensure they meet your business requirements. This helps you determine your costs and architecture. Choosing the right architecture is also important so as to support the workloads across other servers and clouds.
If your business needs automation in Cloud implementation, it’s time you considered the advantages of Cloud Management Platforms. It is however advisable to test and retest before you actually deploy your architecture and CMP.
