CLOUD COMPUTING

Public, Private and Hybrid Clouds All Share a Common Challenge

Frank J. Ohlhorst | Date: 07-14-11 | Comments

Cloud computing may be all the rage, but IT managers are finding that supporting and deploying cloud-based technologies is often a challenge that spins rapidly out of control.

Perhaps VMware CEO Paul Maritz said it best at a press event this week in San Francisco. Maritz opinioned that "Cloud computing needs to become easier to manage and less costly to operate." Of course, the CEO of VMware has a reason to make such a statement—his company is offering new technologies that are supposed to make the cloud easier to deploy and manage. However, it is a concern that many companies have expressed to an industry that is hungry for easy and cheap cloud solutions.

Nevertheless, the results of technological innovations rarely meet expectations, and nowhere is that more true than in the cloud, where confusion and meaningless acronyms seem to reign supreme. There is one undeniable truth about the cloud, however: It must become easier to manage for IT staffers before it can be considered a technology that reinvents enterprise computing—at least that's the point VMware's Maritz is trying to make.

It's a business axiom that management leads to success; that is, when something is properly managed, its chances of being a success are greatly improved. The problem with today's cloud technologies lies in the sheer number of platforms, services and technologies that are striving to do much the same thing—deliver applications to an endpoint, without the complexity of an in-house client-server network.

The problem is that a cloud-based offering often proves to be more complex than a traditional client-server approach. Take, for example, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), one of the latest offerings to come from the cloud. Here, a traditional in-house infrastructure is replaced by a virtualized entity housed somewhere out in the cloud. From an IT manager's point of view, that may initially seem like an easier concept to manage. Worries about data centers, hardware, even software can be mostly cast aside, allowing the IT manager to focus on what's important, namely, user interaction with data. Sometimes that is, indeed, true.

But once you try to move beyond the normal, or canned, solutions, things become inherently complex, if not impossible to deal with. Simply put, IT managers are finding that they are trading one set of complexities for another, and, in most cases, the complexities introduced by the cloud require new management techniques, education and tools.

That situation has led to dozens of vendors introducing management modules that specifically work with cloud technologies and virtualization solutions, each with its own dashboards and limitations, and each with its own learning curves, costs and licensing.

So what, exactly, needs to change for cloud adoption to accelerate? First and foremost, IT managers need to have a "single pane of glass" view of cloud operations, which incorporates management controls to provision services. What's more, those management controls must support drill-down, plug-in and forensic capabilities. Once cloud platform providers offer those types of management tools—ones that make things actually easier for IT managers—cloud adoption will become a no-brainer for many businesses.

Hopefully, new solutions from VMware, SolarWinds, Virtual Instruments and countless other companies will bring them insightful management capabilities that will make things easier for the IT department.

Frank Ohlhorst is an award-winning technology journalist, professional speaker and IT business consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the technology arena. He has written for several leading technology and business publications, and was also executive technology editor at eWEEK and director at CRN Test Center.