Table of Contents
- Summary
- Cloud Management Platforms Primer
- Report Methodology
- Decision Criteria Analysis
- Evaluation Metrics
- Key Criteria: Impact Analysis
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
Today’s IT infrastructures are growing ever more complex as demand for digital transformation—and response to evolving business needs—increases. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures are becoming the norm, but that hasn’t meant that data centers and legacy applications have disappeared.
Enterprises today must deal with a wide variety of far-flung users and disparate systems, and must be able to provision and support them both, safely and efficiently, However, few enterprise IT organizations know how to manage multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, let alone with the agility today’s businesses demand. Cloud management platforms (CMPs) enable customers to manage their complex environments more efficiently and with less cost.
Cloud management has three aspects that can be separate tools or intergrated to some level. The three areas are automation, operational optimization, and financial optimization and reporting. The names of these three groups are Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Resource Optimization, and Financial Operations (FinOps). The following graphic shows how these areas relate. This report covers Cloud Management Platforms, and GigaOm has other reports on the other two topics.
Figure 1: Three Aspects of Total Cloud Management
This Gigaom Key Criteria report details the key issues and trends to consider around the use of CMPs. Indeed, we’ll identify key criteria and evaluation metrics for selecting a management tool platform as well as identify vendors and products that excel. This report will give you an overview of the key enabling technology that can be obtained today and will help decision-makers evaluate existing platforms and decide where to invest.
How to Read this Report
This GigaOm report is one of a series of documents that helps IT organizations assess competing solutions in the context of well-defined features and criteria. For a fuller understanding consider reviewing the following reports:
Key Criteria report: A detailed market sector analysis that assesses the impact that key product features and criteria have on top-line solution characteristics—such as scalability, performance, and TCO—that drive purchase decisions.
GigaOm Radar report: A forward-looking analysis that plots the relative value and progression of vendor solutions along multiple axes based on strategy and execution. The Radar report includes a breakdown of each vendor’s offering in the sector.
Solution Profile: An in-depth vendor analysis that builds on the framework developed in the Key Criteria and Radar reports to assess a company’s engagement within a technology sector. This analysis includes forward-looking guidance around both strategy and product.