What is Cloud Management?

What is Cloud Management?

Cloud management is the management of cloud computing products and services. This includes monitoring, analytics, and optimization of cloud resources. The goal of cloud management is to take advantage of the benefits of operating in the cloud while mitigating the risks and controlling cost.

Cloud Monitoring

In order to manage, you need to understand what is going on. Metrics showing how cloud resources are being used will give you that insight. The standard set of metrics available from the cloud service provider may be enough. However, in other cases you will need to use a separate solution offering richer or more granular metrics through a cloud management tool.

Cloud Analytics

Once you have secured access to adequate metrics, they need to be analyzed in order to provide actionable insights. This analysis could be about predicting future requirements based on historical trends or new business events. Or it could be about identifying situations where the already allocated resources don’t match the actual requirements. In that case, you could be wasting money on unused cloud resources.     

Cloud Optimization

The analysis will highlight a set of improvements that should be implemented. Predicted requirements need to be evaluated against architectural limitations, cloud cost constraints, and (potentially) better alternatives to the current service to choose the best course of action. One activity that should always be included in cloud optimization is right-sizing and turning off resources no longer in use.

As with managing any other part of your hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud management activities aim for efficiency and visibility. You need to know what’s happening with your cloud resources, identify current and future needs, and continuously optimize.