As mentioned in our last newsletter, IT organizations are beginning to acquire a wide range of traditional IT applications from SaaS providers. This newsletter will discuss one of the challenges that this new wave of SaaS-based applications is targeting – managing other cloud based applications.
In this newsletter, the phrase cloud management refers to the management of the services and applications that are provided by a cloud computing service provider (CCSP). As is typically the case with the deployment of most new technologies and services, there was at best a minimum of management capability associated with the first generation of CCSP services. For example, the initial wave of CCSP services came with little if any commitment on the part of the service providers relative to an SLA. The SLAs that were provided were based strictly on the availability, and not the performance of the CCSP’s service. These SLAs also required the customer to use primitive techniques such as logging to prove that the CCSP’s solution didn’t meet the promised level of availability.
Seemingly to make up for this weakness, it was common at many of the early cloud computing conferences to have one or more speakers display graphs and charts of some of the major cloud providers and drive home the point that CCSPs usually have high availability. This line of reasoning reminds us of the refrain in that old song that went “don’t worry, be happy”.
We don’t dispute the fact that a best effort approach is totally appropriate for many applications and workloads. That said, we strongly believe that there is a large and growing set of applications and workloads for which a best effort level of support is not appropriate.
In our next newsletter we will discuss another meaning of the phrase cloud management. More information on this topic can be found here.
In the mean time, we would also like to hear from you. What use is your organization making of cloud based IT services?
