CloudBolt Software this week added a framework consisting of eight modules that collectively make it simpler to automate, optimize and govern hybrid cloud computing environments.
Jeff Kukowski, CloudBolt CEO, said the goal is to provide IT teams with a more modular approach to managing multiple clouds that they can employ as they gain additional expertise.
The modules provided by CloudBolt address everything from providing a repository, dubbed Automation Exchange, through which reusable automation content can be shared to implementing governance policies and tracking cloud spending.
Other modules address testing and assurance, integration, automated discovery and machine learning algorithms that can be used to automate processes.
While most organizations employ multiple clouds alongside on-premises IT environments, the management of IT across an extended enterprise is far from unified. A recent survey published by CloudBolt found a full 88% of respondents needed a “manager of managers” that would enable them to unify the various silos that have multiplied across their IT environment. CloudBolt Software is making a case for an IT framework that provides a layer of abstraction through which the management of multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments can be unified.
It’s not clear whether organizations are deliberately employing multiple clouds or if, because of simple inertia, they have found themselves managing multiple cloud platforms because of decisions made by various application development teams. Some IT organizations employ multiple clouds because they are concerned about either becoming locked in to a specific cloud computing service; others are concerned an outage on one platform might take all their applications offline. Others simply take advantage of services that are better provided by one cloud service provider than another. It’s also not uncommon for one organization to acquire another that relied on a completely different platform to deploy applications.
Regardless of how IT organizations found themselves managing multiple clouds, the total cost of IT rises as each new platform is added to an IT environment. Just as challenging is the fact that each new platform exposes some type of automation framework. Before too long, IT teams find themselves having to navigate multiple islands of automation implemented across a highly distributed computing environment. In many cases, those automation instances are reinventing the same process that has already been automated on another platform using a completely different toolset.
It is more a question of time and the degree to which IT organizations will eventually consolidate management of disparate IT environments under some type of unified control plane that enables true hybrid cloud computing. Once that capability is achieved, IT teams should find it simpler to migrate workloads from one platform to another.
In the meantime, most organizations will be managing multiple IT environments for the foreseeable future. The only thing that is unclear is the volume of workloads that might be running on one of those platforms at any given time. The challenge—and the opportunity—is to regain control over computing environments increasingly more distributed.
