As businesses migrate their services to the Cloud, the importance of centralized IT management cannot be overstated; by extension, centralized reporting, as well. Especially when it comes to making operations robust — and keeping them this way. Unfortunately, few businesses are prepared for this shift in IT management; which, at the end of the day, is a prerequisite for success in the Cloud.
Now, the question arises: How did those few businesses prepare for this shift? Luckily, the answer is simple: They’ve invested in a Cloud Management Platform (CMP) to simplify IT management and reduce cloud costs.
So, let’s see how you can use a CMP to centralize management and optimize operations.
Using a CMP for centralized IT management and reporting
An all-around Cloud Management Platform comes with a single interface that allows you to handle disparate technologies easily; while providing a centralized view of your operations across all environments. Through centralized management and reporting, you gain insights into which resources and services are being used. Also, you automatically know who’s using them, and how much each unit costs.
Centralized management — Taking Ops to the next level
To clarify, when we say centralized IT management, we mean the centralized administration of cloud assets; including applications, and resources. Hence, it immediately becomes obvious how much a CMP can contribute to this approach. And, how does centralizing IT management boost operations? Long story short, by:
1. Facilitating automation, and self-service DevOps
When choosing a Cloud Management Platform, you need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. How are you going to do that? Well, you can look for a CMP that can support self-service DevOps. To elaborate on this, a self-service DevOps platform allows you to standardize your stack, infrastructure, tools, configurations, web designs, etc.
This essentially means that you can set up your cloud resources, manage your apps and integrate CI/CD tools. Once you do, you can streamline repeatable tasks in your software development lifecycle and apply DevOps automation practices. In this way, you’ll reach operational efficiency faster.
2. Optimizing workflows
Another perk of using a CMP to centralize IT management is being able to optimize application deployment workflows. When you’ve automated tasks, and put automation tools and practices to good use, you can also enable automated workflows and infrastructure provisioning. The result? Teams work faster, and much more efficiently than before; and, finally, they can get creative with new features or entirely new applications or projects.
3. Managing applications
With Cloud Management Software up and running, you have access to a central location to view, maintain and take action on your applications. Through a single, integrated place of action, you can easily manage and monitor applications, and their underlying resources; while, of course, using automation, to minimize issues, and downtime. In case an issue does occur, your centralized cloud management portal will send the proper alert to help you fix it, right then and there.
4. Keeping resource usage and cloud costs under control
Without centralized IT management, you are susceptible to uncontrollable cloud spending, because you don’t have visibility. Conversely, when you opt for centralized IT management and reporting, you get a bird’s eye view of all your cloud activities; and, across all environments. Specifically, you see which services are being used, who is using them, for what purpose, and how much it costs.
In this regard, you can create isolated workspaces for your environments and allow access to the necessary available resources. This essentially allows you to manage your resources; and then, check if their allocation is in sync with the respective cloud environment requirements.
Centralized reporting for efficient IT management
For centralized IT management to work, you need centralized reporting, as well; these two should always go hand in hand. Just logging into the interface, you can centrally manage a wide spectrum of operational tasks; and, act on the detailed data you get through the reports. Put differently, centralized reporting helps you make informed decisions.
All in all, a centralized system of reporting:
- Provides visibility into resource management activities
- Identifies resources that may be duplicate or underutilized
- Offers detailed usage data
- Enables improved decision-making
As a final point, having access to a wealth of data will help you understand trends and capacity. Consequently, you can be accurate with budgeting. On the other hand, you’ll be able to forecast both the requirements in usage, and cloud costs.
Reaping the benefits of centralized IT management and reporting
IT Management centralization is a strategic move on the transformational journey towards digital convergence and successful operations; as is centralized reporting. Only, when you embark on this journey, make sure to take a step in the right direction: Start using a comprehensive Cloud Management Platform to gain complete visibility into your operations. Needless to say, this is essential if you are to take control of your cloud environments.
At the end of the day, how can centralized IT management — along with centralized reporting — make your operations robust? In a nutshell, they can:
- Simplify IT management
- Boost team productivity
- Increase the quality of services
- Speed up time-to-market
- Reduce cloud costs
- Improve user experience
Another thing to take home is that centralizing IT management and reporting not only helps streamline operations; but it also helps future-proof your cloud strategy. Now, that’s a huge step towards cloud success, don’t you agree?