4 Business Benefits of Cloud Management Technology

Those who create or leverage clouds, whether private or public, need to manage those clouds during they support core business processes. Cloud management is a set of approaches and technologies that are evolving as the world of cloud computing becomes more complex, and as the applications, data, and processing that reside on clouds become increasingly critical to the success of the business.

While the innovation behind cloud management tools is so then known, the business value is not also understood. There are several business reasons to consider cloud management innovation right now, earlier you begin to roll out private, hybrid, and public cloud-based systems and infrastructure. These reasons include:

Additional uptime means additional productivity, and that translates into additional money saved. During it's at times tough to put a value on up-time stats, many businesses will lose as much as a million dollars a day, or more, if their core business systems are not functioning correctly. Cloud management research can spot issues earlier they become true outages, and can pay for itself with a single instance of an averted problem.

SLA reporting refers to the fact that cloud management innovation can monitor a cloud provider's ability to live up to the SLA, or service level agreement, that has been established. Response times, latency, and uptime need to be tracked over time, and the cloud provider or cloud manager is alerted when the system behavior does not support the pre-established criteria. In many instances, there are financial penalties that the provider must pay. I had a client once get a check at the end of the month, in other words than an invoice.

The effectiveness of security

Compliance management involves monitoring the effectiveness of security and compliance. Typically the system keeps logs to support compliance audits and other activities. Considering that my healthcare customers must constantly deal with this issue, cloud management tools provide a first line of defense by both remaining in compliance with existing rules and regulations, as then as reporting to auditors who are constantly in the building. Results of not being compliant could mean stiff fines or maybe suspension of operations, each of which is a business killer. None of this changes when moving to the cloud.

Finally, understanding disasters is the ability to do a post mortem on outages and other failures. Cloud management innovation allows you to track the operations of a cloud-based system, including what happened in the lead-up to a failure. I had a client once who thought his cloud provider was killing connections on him, in doing so causing several short outages per day. It turned out that he had a network problem on his end, as reported by the cloud management software. Problem corrected, money saved.

The best way to figure out the value of cloud management software for your business is to do some simple calculations around its value. For me, that's the cost of averting issues just as outages and compliance problems, each having an easy-to-measure impact on the business. When enterprise companies add up the cost of avoiding such issues over a year's time, it typically goes then past a million dollars, which makes the use of cloud management research the best investment on the market when you move to cloud computing.

However, this innovation is not something that solves all of your problems. You need to leverage this research around the right strategy, and with the right people. Training should be a huge part of the deployment plan for cloud management tools, and you'll as well want a policy to constantly monitor their effectiveness.