What Are The Top Cloud Management Platforms?
Author: Mark Hillary
In my last couple of articles here I explored Cloud Management Platforms (CMP), both to define what they are and to give some ideas on how to choose the best one for a particular business. It was therefore interesting to see that a recent article in ITPro Today explores the top ten CMPs available today, assessing all their strengths and weaknesses.
All CMPs need to provide lifecycle management – this is the ability to track cloud resources over a period of time – and data protection, in addition to the main functionality of controlling and automating cloud-based processes. John Webster, a senior partner and analyst at the Evaluator Group, managed the research published in ITPro Today. One of his main concerns when comparing the different CMPs was that not all of them are keenly focused on data protection – they are focusing mainly on basic functionality.
John explained: “Data protection and disaster recovery is an IT responsibility, a bedrock function, and I think that the vendors in this space have to really start looking at that seriously.” He added: “Vendors will likely provide these capabilities through extensions to data protection and disaster recovery applications that are already available in the market.”
The top ten list of CMPs was created by weighing up several factors, including:
- The quality of the user interface
- Ability to manage various groups of users
- Complexity of the service
Cost control is an important area of functionality that most customers want to use, but many CMP vendors find it very difficult to offer because they are constantly updating their products. The ability to create efficiency is much easier to plan when the software is stable. If the CMP is constantly being improved then there is an almost constant need to explore efficiencies.
John explained that support for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is likely to be an important capability in the near future. He said: “Support for cloud-native including Kubernetes, and application migration will be key functions in cloud management platform tools. AI assistance, or the assistance of artificial intelligence, will become more and more important as time goes on.”
Some of the CMPs on the market at present have been built from trusted and tested systems that were essentially managing IT estates – they have been converted to managing cloud-based systems, but others are built from scratch. It’s important to be aware of this when selecting a supplier. The start-ups might move faster and add more features all the time, but their platforms may be less stable and less tested in real-life situations.
The ten CMPs are not listed with the best in position one; they are just grouped as the ten best CMPs. This is because ultimately the right choice of CMP will be based on the different priorities and needs of each company. Follow the link to the article and you can read the top ten free, providing you submit your contact details to the magazine.