Cloud Management - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 88

Information technology just keeps on evolving. With cloud
computing, it's taken to another level. And because of that,
chief information officers (CIOs) and administrators are
scratching their heads at the sheer enormity of the task that is cloud management.
Thankfully there are a lot of choices for services and applications that are meant to
make things simpler and more streamlined, allowing administrators to simply sit back and
let the system monitor the cloud infrastructure with minimum intervention required.
Cloud management does not start with the administration portion after deployment;
it starts during the planning phase. All of the aspects of the cloud must be well thought
out from a management perspective, from the proper operation of computing resources,
updates, and upgrades to customer service and legal support.
Management is especially critical in enterprises where agility and efficiency are the main
drivers because cloud technology is essential and key to addressing and achieving business
objectives. This is because cloud computing is now considered a definite way to significantly
drive business process efficiency, innovation, and differentiation of selling points. Proper
management is therefore a pivotal requirement to achieve these benefits.
With today's highly competitive and connected world, customers are more vocal about
their opinions than ever, leading companies to constantly innovate and deliver new ideas and
services in order to stay in the game or ahead of the competition. In the past, enterprise IT
has often been the bottleneck. It has greatly affected a company's agility because developers
and QA engineers had to wait in line for IT administrators to go through their queue before
development and testing platforms could be provisioned for them.
To address these concerns, most enterprises have turned to cloud computing and exploring
its benefits in their own data centers using private clouds. For fast on-demand access and pro-
visioning, smart resource allocation and scheduling, resource monitoring, and environment
control, what we know as traditional IT must abandon its reactive ways, simply waiting for
requests and orders, and be more predictive and proactive to the needs of the organization.
This is especially true when it comes to data center and computing resource management.
Understanding Cloud Management
Platforms
Cloud technology is proliferating at a high rate of speed, and a lot of organizations are diving
into cloud computing because of the benefits. Most enterprises are at the very least implement-
ing some type of on-premise private cloud, while a growing number are starting to use public