Solving cloud management challenges with CloudOps and other Ops practices

[HPE_Experts]

Cloud management faces complexity and other challenges that can be addressed through centralized platforms and automation. HPE provides cloud management solutions to optimize multicloud environments.

The cloud management platform market has been evolving over the past years. According to current market trends, the cloud market predictions include the rise of hybrid cloud and multicloud. According to IDC, by 2028, almost all newly developed applications will be multicloud enabled.¹   

Data from the market suggests significant progress. More than 60% of the businesses will modernize up to half of their cloud infrastructure, using better options and with the use of intelligent management tools.² They also aim for flexibility in choosing the right solution for them and seeing the cost savings of their overall cloud spending. The majority of enterprises struggle with cloud complexity, including integration and management across different cloud environments.

Voices from our customers

A frequent concern is the technical complexity customers face when managing new services and technologies that are frequently emerging. It can be overwhelming to integrate different application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools into an existing architecture. They would also want to avoid data silos and ensure seamless communication between clouds and integrations. Moreover, small IT teams struggle to obtain the necessary skills to maintain everything across multiple platforms and technologies.

In terms of lifecycle management, teams are struggling to track changes and assess impact across multiple platforms. Inconsistency occurs when trying to provision or manage different resources. Configuration management is also an added challenge when dealing with diverse configurations and settings. A standardized approach needs to be applied to the service lifecycle across different platforms. 

Financial visibility is a top priority with frequent increases and changes in costs. Cost analytics combined with governance for optimization insights is needed. Enterprises would be able to check actual spending, and based on that data, be able to forecast and manage future spending trends. Complex pricing models with different structures and hidden costs would imply cross-charge complexity across departments and projects.  

In terms of security and governance, there are diverse frameworks in place, with fragmented identity and access management. This leads to complex risk management that requires incident response planning.

For real-time observability, data overload with different data sources and metrics causes inconsistencies across multiple platforms. The resources are sprawled with untracked changes, with no standardization process, without naming conventions or resource tagging.

It all comes down to the choices and flexibility of the right mix of services and resources we need to use. We avoid dependencies on providers and migration difficulties in the future, offering enterprises the operational agility to respond and adapt quickly to market changes.

To summarize, the most common challenges we would like to address are as follows:

• Complexity: Different and diverse infrastructures and application architectures increase landscape complexity
• Integration: Ensuring interoperability of the tools and services across different cloud providers
• Visibility: Gaining data-driven management of resources, performance, and challenges
• Governance and security: Ensuring security policies and compliance regulations are applied homogeneously

How to solve these challenges?

We propose to address these challenges with a set of key strategies.

Firstly, it all revolves around having a centralized platform for organizations to seamlessly manage, monitor, and optimize resources across multiple cloud providers, ensuring improved visibility, cost efficiency, and security. Based on this unified experience, the aim is to simplify the management of different infrastructures and ecosystems and bring them under a standardized approach.

To ensure visibility and control across different cloud environments, a broader ecosystem of tools and services is required. This helps streamline operations by providing a single pane of glass for monitoring and management. In addition, we developed strategic partnerships and a unique ecosystem where we collaborate with different providers to ensure seamless interoperability between various integrations. This helps organizations leverage the best of each platform without any interruptions due to tool incompatibility. You can benefit from having quick metrics and financial data available for each resource with a cloud management platform that can be used for a quick overview and health check.

Leveraging automation and orchestration reduces manual work and boosts efficiency. This includes automatic deployments, scaling, and management processes across diverse cloud platforms. Another popular example is applying security patches in a timely manner, ensuring current resources are protected with the latest software and that governance and compliance policies are met.

To gain full visibility of the existing infrastructure, it is recommended to employ a data-driven approach. This means looking at the resource parameters and metrics, determining their performance, and adjusting parameters accordingly. For example, using internal guidance metrics, if a virtual machine (VM) is used less in a customer environment, the tooling might suggest reducing its resources or using a power schedule to save resources and costs. Another example regarding financial visibility is that we help organizations check their actual cloud spend by extracting and processing raw financial data from multiple cloud environments. With proper tagging of resources and seamless interoperability between the tools, we ensure complex financials are properly processed and comprehensive bills are sent to the end customers at the end of each month and ready for payment.

You can rely on Hewlett Packard Enterprise for agnostic hybrid cloud management.

HPE has a broader ecosystem of services for an end-to-end transformation journey. We offer a range of advisory services for business, financial, and technical requirement discovery. We bring clarity to existing environments and analyze and assess all layers of the current infrastructure from a technical point of view. We design and build multicloud management architecture leveraging HPE Morpheus Software.

Using integration services, our teams can design and deliver special components integrated into a complete multicloud management ecosystem. We consider different practices for financial visibility, connectivity, networking, security, and various software components and integrate them with existing cloud resources.

In collaboration with other teams (such as managed services), we provide remote operation services and assist customers in effectively managing their infrastructure.

As an addition, our educational services offer enablement programs to manage and operate the multicloud management platform.

Learn more about our multicloud platform services and what are the benefits of adopting a multicloud management approach.

Read about how HPE achieves seamless VM migration with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization and our extensive cloud native expertise here: community.hpe.com/t5/the-cloud-experience-everywhere/achieve-seamless-virtual-machine-migration-to-red-hat-openshift/ba-p/7236659

Learn more: hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00149622enw

^{1, 2} “IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2025 Predictions,” Document number US52640724, Oct 2024

Meet the Author:

Elena Herman, Cloud Solution Architect, HPE