Table of Contents
- Summary
- Market Categories and Deployment Types
- Key Criteria Comparison
- GigaOm Radar
- Vendor Insights
- Analyst’s Take
- Methodology
- About Dana Hernandez
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
In response to digital transformation and evolving business needs, organizations are increasingly moving their applications to the cloud. Multicloud and hybrid cloud infrastructures are now the norm; however, data centers and legacy applications haven’t disappeared. This means organizations must contend with disparate systems and users around the world, all of which lead to complex and hard-to-manage infrastructure.
Cloud management platforms (CMPs) help organizations to manage these complex environments and control costs more effectively. A CMP that can manage both on-premises automation and orchestration needs, as well as the cloud hosting, will provide greater value than separate tools that do only on-premises or public cloud deployments.
Previously, essential functions such as asset tracking and dependency mapping ran in data centers with redundancy to protect against outages and ensure high levels of uptime. They used the asset tag of a physical server to track places where an application was running. The number of CPUs, network connections, and the amount of RAM and storage physical servers used was static and sized for peak expected workloads years in advance. This resulted in oversizing and wasted capacity.
Today, hardware is ephemeral, and organizations can’t use a physical server’s asset tag to track where an application is running. Additionally, in the cloud, none of these values—memory, CPU (count, type, speed, generation), storage, and network properties—are fixed. This is part of the promise of the cloud—to pay for only what is being used.
To ensure cloud implementations live up to this expectation, management systems must be able to track utilization, performance, and cost and relate them to the solution the business is paying for. CMPs provide real-time or near real-time situational awareness of the health and performance of a business solution. This helps businesses avoid both overspending and unplanned outages due to lack of capacity management.
More comprehensive CMP solutions also manage storage, security, disaster recovery, system health and performance, and application lifecycles. These are just a few examples of the functions that must now be managed across multiple planes while accounting for multiple, often differing, requirements—cloud versus on-premises, hardware versus software, and ephemeral versus persistent storage, for example.
This GigaOm Radar report highlights key CMP vendors and equips IT decision-makers with the information needed to select the best fit for their business and use case requirements. In the corresponding GigaOm report “Key Criteria for Evaluating CMPs,” we describe in more detail the capabilities and metrics used to evaluate vendors in this market.
This is our second year evaluating the CMP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. All solutions included in this Radar report meet the following table stakes—capabilities widely adopted and well implemented in the sector:
- Hybrid and multicloud support
- Event processing
- Data correlation
- Alert management
- Recovery management
- Abstraction
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.