Micro Focus has made available a multi-tenant cloud management platform that can be deployed in a public cloud or on-premises IT environment.

Travis Greene, senior director for IT operations management at Micro Focus, said the Hybrid Cloud Management X (HCMX) platform makes it possible to unify the management of IT services across a hybrid cloud computing environment spanning a diverse range of platforms, including public clouds and VMware environments.

At its core, HCMX is a unified portal and service catalog through which IT teams can find, request and consume information and enterprise services. It is built on the same framework as Service Automation Framework, X (SMAX), an IT service management (ITSM) platform also offered by Micro Focus. As such, HCMX can also leverage the same natural language engine, search and virtual agent technologies that Micro Focus makes available on SMAX.

HCMX also provides a library of reusable workflows through which IT teams can automate processes along with a set of governance policies that automatically trigger workflows based on events or input from an IT administrator that would, for example, limit usage of a specific cloud service.

In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, there is more pressure than ever to rein in IT costs. One way to reduce those costs in the multi-cloud era is to centralize the management of those environments under a common control plane. Most IT organizations today rely on separate tools and consoles to manage IT platforms in isolation from one another. Not only are licensing fees incurred for each management platform, but also IT often has to hire specialists to manage each individual platform. As hybrid cloud computing platforms continue to mature, it becomes possible to rely on a fewer number of IT generalists to centralize the management of IT.

Of course, transitioning to a single hybrid cloud computing environment requires a significant amount of time and effort. IT organizations need to make a multiyear commitment to a single platform to reduce the total cost of IT. Many organizations simply lack the ability to enforce the adoption of a single management platform across multiple divisions within an organization regardless of potential savings. However, organizations that do make the transition should be able to not only reduce the total cost of IT but also more flexibly choose where to deploy their next generation of application workloads based on the cost and merits of one platform over another.

In addition, at a time when the parent company of any one of the major cloud service providers might become a direct competitor overnight, many organizations now prefer to keep their IT options open. The challenge, of course, is making sure workloads deployed on any of those platforms are not dependent on a proprietary interface that doesn’t exist anywhere else.

Micro Focus, of course, is not the only provider of IT management tools focused on hybrid cloud computing. The decision IT organizations need to come to terms with is determining which of these platforms provides the greatest amount of flexibility at a cost that organizations can absorb.