As many companies now rely on the Cloud, many of them end up having multiple providers, which makes IT department’s work difficult. In the absence of a centralized management solution, IT must cope with increasing complexity and load. The Cisco CloudCenter suite eliminates these challenges and helps beneficiaries be flexible in the adoption and integration of Cloud services.

Two years ago, over 80% of companies were using Cloud services from several providers, with an average of 4.9 providers per company. But increasing diversity comes with a number of specific challenges generated by:

• Instruments with limited coverage. Own management solutions delivered by Cloud service providers do not ensure the management of other public Cloud environments or traditional on-premises infrastructures.
• Outdated management solutions. Many organizations use the same tools employed in their own data centers, inadequately meeting the new requirements for monitoring multi-cloud environments.
• Difficulties in identifying appropriate tools. The variety of Cloud services and usage scenarios is also reflected in the offer diversity. For example, Gartner set no less than 215 evaluation criteria for a multi-cloud management platform.

Multiple environments, one platform

Datanet’s recommendation for companies that want to capitalize on the multi-Cloud offer on the market is Cisco CloudCenter Suite.

The first argument in this regard is that the Cisco platform is one of the few cloud-agnostic solutions on the market, which covers an extended ecosystem of providers. Cisco CloudCenter Suite supports over 20 environments and regions (AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, VMware vCloud Air etc.) and is compatible with OpenStack, VMware vCloud Director, Microsoft Azure Pack, Cisco UCS Director, Cisco ACI etc.

Secondly, the Cisco suite uses three dedicated modules to simplify multi-cloud environments management:

• Workload manager – Ensures effective management of Cloud services and applications, helping you create, deploy and optimize the integration of the public Cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The module facilitates the process of defining and implementing policies in heterogeneous environments by expanding visibility and centralizing control.
• Cost Optimizer – With its help, you can analyze the consumption patterns of resources, both on-premises, and Public Cloud. The module performs cost analysis and control and allows you to identify optimization strategies by reducing over-provisioning.
• Action Orchestrator – Helps you coordinate and automate workflows by integrating on-premises infrastructure and external environments with an extensive set of standardized adapters and interfaces.

Another important differentiator of the Cisco CloudCenter Suite is that it installs quickly. For this suite it includes two administration components – Suite Admin and Suite Installer – which have the role of developing specific microservices for the three modules.

What are the benefits 

The first beneficiary of Cisco CloudCenter Suite is the operational team that effectively manages multi-Cloud environments. These users will eliminate repetitive tasks and human errors, have visibility and control over how Cloud services are used and their performance, as well as the ability to define and apply global policies.

Then comes developers, who no longer have to write code to make customizations, the Cisco suite allowing them to automate the configuration and launch services in any environment. This without using dedicated management tools. With the help of Cisco CloudCenter Suite, the workload lifecycle can be fully managed (whether it’s a single virtual machine, application or Kubernetes cluster) in development, testing or production environments, in any “combination” of on-premises infrastructures and public Cloud.

To make Cisco CloudCenter Suite seamless, Datanet specialists provide complete support for both deployment, configuration, and customization but also integration.

Contact us right now at sales@datanets.ro if you want to manage multi-Cloud environments more efficiently.