Managing Workload on a Public Cloud

– Dr. Naveen Gurusiddaiah, Head of PreSales, Micro Focus India

Lately, enterprises have stopped being shy about shifting their mission critical apps and data into the public cloud. It’s no surprise that CIOs are being miserly about what they put into an internal data center, considering the pricing advantages and on-demand services that cloud offers today. An IDC survey states that by 2018, public IT cloud services will account for over half of the world’s software, server and storage spending growth. The research firm also predicts that public IT cloud services spending will reach more than $127 billion in 2018. Of course, security is a significant concern on everyone’s mind. It is a less known fact that public cloud can be as secure as any other computing environment through the joint efforts of IT and service providers. With the right cloud manager, you can avail the multiple benefits of public cloud without any issues.

Once you have shifted the workload to a public cloud, the immediate concern is how you’ll manage workload on it. Cloud infrastructure requires a different approach to workload management. Whether you’re already on your way or just starting out, consider the following factors when you pick out your ideal cloud manager:

Simplify Complexities

While cloud gives the freedom to choose and alter operating systems, databases, application frameworks, this customization leads to new complexities that didn’t exist in traditional environments.A good and efficient cloud management solution should give you customization along with the right management tools, source control and configuration management. At the same time, it’s important to see how your physical resources on the cloud are allocated and utilised with aids like graphs and statistical information.

Role-Based Access Control

Good visibility also means having roles and privileges built into the public cloud environment. A good cloud manager can enable you to allocate access, based on the team one belongs to or the position he/she holds. With such a feature, you can tune the system to ensure that the storage team gets access only to their relevant data and applications - for instance, cloud-based storage components -while the virtualization team gets access only to the virtual machine management. This isolation of roles creates effective audit trails and greatly reduces the risk of a team member making incorrect changes to the system.

Flexibility and Choice

As a client, you must expect increased efficiency along with the freedom to choose cloud services that work best for your organization. An efficient cloud manager should enable enterprises to easily deploy and support a secure, reliable and scalable cloud infrastructure. The cloud management platform should ideally provide flexibility that lets you to determine the ideal mix of traditional and public cloud workloads without worrying about growing management costs.

Automation

Your cloud manager should have the ability to automate your organization’s applications running in one or more supported clouds, including provisioning, scaling, back up and disaster recovery. In case of public cloud, the process of managing applications often involves dealing with repetitive tasks, especially in large environments. It isdesigned to be administered by a manager, rather than relying on manual processes to provision each server or push code. A cloud management platform should reduce operational burden and enable enterprises to support ever-growing computing requirements by automating processes.

Agility and Scalability

Change is the only constant in business, and only companies that are agile will survive. Ensuring agility will allow companies to innovate and change course as required. An ideal cloud manager will deliver a dynamic and flexible cloud infrastructure, which will let your IT department rapidly respond to changing needs of the business and capitalize immediately on market opportunities. A cloud manager must also enable enterprises to build for the future. Consequently, IT departments are expected to keep pace with evolving requirements of the business.If a large project comes up and calls for larger servers or multiple servers, the cloud manager should allow the business to scale up for the project easily and quickly.

Support Application Lifecycle

Managing applications will involve a list of events such as updating code, performance optimization, patching security vulnerabilities, backups, capacity management and failover. Your cloud manager will enable you to manage these tasksand equip you with tools thatmonitor, alert, auto-scale and help with configuration management as well as disaster recovery. With these capabilities, your organization will be ready to manage applications across a multi-cloud portfolio and fully realize benefits like cost savings and agility benefits of a public cloud.