For the last 5 years some companies have attempted to build their own cloud solutions, finding it very hard to develop cloud management platforms in-house due to all complexity that comes along with it – even when basing their solution on open source offerings. As a result, companies are working with external Cloud Management Platform (CMP) providers that can help them both with their own digital transformation as well as that of their customers and partners. Analysts have also been recommending this approach, having realized that the promise of both open source solutions and the offerings from the traditional big software and service houses have failed to deliver the ROI and features needed.
Recent examples of this type of collaboration are the deals between IBM and Vodafone as well as Abiquo and Telefonica, one of the world’s leading Telecoms companies.
CIOs are also moving towards hybrid and multi-cloud, either as strategy or for compliance reasons. This adds complexity to the IT environment, just as using cloud technologies was supposed to simplify matters!
We agree with Gartner on the drive to multi-cloud and the fact that technology and infrastructure managers must address this trend to ensure their cloud solutions meet the needs of their business for agility and ease of consumption.
Multi-cloud environments will increase this year as they enable deployment of applications and workloads in the environment that best suits these requirements for compliance, agility, flexibility and simplicity.
Besides, a multi-cloud strategy also creates multi-cloud challenges, such as security and data governance. Every public cloud provider utilizes different hardware and software security policies, methods and mechanisms, creating a challenge for the enterprise to maintain the exact same policy and configuration across all infrastructures.
The use of a hybrid or multi-cloud management platforms is the solution to reduce those risks. Security and data governance are real challenges for the enterprises and having a single pane of glass provides management from a unified dashboard of all different cloud providers. The information from varied sources across multiple applications and environments can be accessed in a more secure way. This is because one of the advantages in a multi cloud CMP is that the credentials for the underlying infrastructure are not visible to the CMP user, be it private cloud or AWS, Azure, Google and so on. This avoids the security risk of either sharing credentials or dealing with employee churn, and as the multi-cloud approach spreads out, it is important to centralize all security aspects. Deleting a user in a CMP such as Abiquo removes the ability of the user to access the provisioning and change functions for the underlying infrastructure.
So, regarding Abiquo’s own experience in the cloud market, we can confirm the fact that CMP providers are of great help to companies on their trip to digital transformation, providing easier management and a great security layer to deliver cloud services to their customers and partners.
