Managing a portfolio of cloud services

ONE OF THE GREATEST CHALLENGES in moving to cloud is to managing multiple suppliers. Cloud is definitely not ‘one size fits all’ – different providers will be better suited to different services, and so organisations will soon find themselves with a portfolio of cloud services which they need to integrate and manage against the agreed SLAs. To make this type of hybrid cloud environment work, it is important to for organisations to get their service management capabilities right. First, they need to define and understand the characteristics of each cloud service that they require. Then they need to map it to the available options and choose the most appropriate service and supplier for their needs. Finally, they need to independently manage each service and monitor it against the agreed SLAs themselves.

Monitoring and management requires two things: an audit function to ensure that the service is and remains fit for purpose, and service monitoring and management, either in-house or contracted through an independent third party, to ensure that the provider actually delivers the contracted service. This becomes more complex as organisations build a cloud portfolio, as they need to find an efficient and effective way to manage multiple suppliers.
Integrated cloud management as a service
An integrated cloud offering is still a work in progress for most organisations. However, management toolsets and remote management and reporting capabilities are rapidly evolving. Cloud monitoring as a service (CMaaS) solutions are now available which aggregate a variety of information sources and consolidate events and other performance statistics across an organisation’s IT supply chain. They create customised service views that show overall service health and provide the ability to drill down into specific services to identify where an issue resides and the potential causes of performance issues. Some systems can also interface directly with operational management tools in order to carry out undertake detailed troubleshooting and problem analysis.
CMaaS should enable organisations to manage complex hybrid cloud environments which may include public cloud, IaaS and PaaS services. Some also offer the ability to manage in-house environments, plus hosted and private cloud services where agents can be deployed or gateways installed into the monitored environment. The advantage of using this type of management solution is that it prevents an organisation’s service and performance issues from becoming lost between multiple suppliers by providing full visibility into how well each of them and the overall IT service is performing. It can identify exactly where performance issues reside and which service provider owns the problem.

Additionally it can help to determine whether contracted Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are being met and if the aggregated service is delivering suitable performance to the user community. If the individual service providers do not allow access to their information, the CMaaS system may be able to send synthetic transactions in order to test performance.

Organisations can also choose to add a management layer to their cloud services. This might on first thought be perceived as unnecessary, as cloud services are all designed to be commodity services, primarily with user self-service through web portals.

However, most organisations prefer, and in many cases need, a human voice and face plus organisation specific information from their services. Thus we are seeing the introduction of cloud management services which offer major incident and problem management, with escalation to third parties if required. They may also include asset management of devices and infrastructure.
The features to look for in a third party cloud management service include:
 Customised services and reporting
 Cross supplier service consolidation and
reporting against defined service levels
 Independent review and reporting on third
party supplier performance
 Service on-boarding and service
management for multiple partners
 Ability to work with other organisations
e.g. network providers for WAN links
 24 x 7 support.

New roles: auditor and broker
The need to manage multiple cloud providers and potentially move services between different providers is also leading to the creation of two new roles – cloud auditor and cloud service broker (CSB).
The role of the cloud auditor is to ensure that services are performing as they should by assessing security, performance and adherence to the agreed SLA. The role of the CSB is to negotiate relationships between cloud providers and users and, as appropriate, move services dynamically between different providers. At present, it is not easy to move between services, but the role will become increasingly important as organisations become more sophisticated in their use of cloud. CIOs could allocate the role of service broker to a member of their IT team to manage the cloud vendor/s if the organisation has the capability to act as broker. If they do not have the skills in-house then a third party can provide this service.
In Fordway’s experience, medium sized businesses face the greatest challenges in funding their IT infrastructure. With a small in-house team, they are unlikely to have the diverse range of skills required to run a complex IT infrastructure, and hence either have to take a ‘best guess’ approach or turn to external experts on a regular basis. Developing a hybrid cloud infrastructure with carefully chosen use of managed cloud services will enable them to focus internal resources on the services most critical to their business.

Caption
Figure 1: the cloud environment and roles (source NIST)