Remote Management of a Cloud Infrastructure

By: Sanjay Motwani, Regional Director, APAC, Raritan Asia Pacific

Over the past few years, economic uncertainty and the subsequent impact on businesses have led many IT organizations down a cost reduction path to virtualization of their IT infrastructure, and the eventual transition to the cloud. According to Market & Markets report, cloud infrastructure market is expected to reach $209.66 billion by 2022, growing at CAGR of 12.9% between 2016 and 2022. In fact, Gartner estimates that more than $1trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to the Cloud in the next five years.

The shift to greater connectivity has had a great impact on IT systems worldwide, especially with the advancement of Internet of Things where millions of smart devices share data in real time. Outages and downtime are not an option in this connected world where organizations need to run critical operations non-stop on low power, while taking environmental factors into considerations.

These trends have altered how enterprises work, requiring data centers to find newer ways of meeting computing demands. Hence, system operators capitalize on the cloud access for centralized, proactive management and reduce costs as they will be able to anticipate maintenance and avoid location-based repairs. Besides Cloud, flash storage, software-defined networks (SDN), virtualization and new data center management tools help data center managers to deliver the data.

However, before an organization jumps on the cloud bandwagon, it is important to identify the tools that will be needed to control, manage and secure this new cloud-based architecture. With application virtualization and additional access options such as mobile smartphones and tablets – not always owned by the business – how do you ensure secure access to your network? The costs to rip and replace existing infrastructures can be exorbitant, given that there are several server management challenges in the cloud. Firstly, the server access, management and control will be with the cloud provider. Secondly, the cloud is vulnerable to phishing and malware attacks, viruses and spam. The other challenges include adherence to security and compliance policies and reliability of the IT infrastructure.

The ability to monitor the cloud infrastructure along with other interdependent components will dictate how robust the IT systems of the organizations are. Irrespective of which kind of cloud is chosen—private, public, or hybrid—each may each require its own set of tools. Data center managers need to have the right kind of visibility into their environments so that they have the appropriate tools and software. It is important to make sure that the Cloud management tools are directly aligned with the data center strategy and business goals. Without the right management tools, your go-to-market strategy could suffer.

There are many benefits of a cloud management solution. It provides the data center manager an economical, secure and centralized server management with dynamic power management and advanced security features. It will enable the data center manager to access the cloud anytime, anywhere, while also helping in asset management through capacity, provisioning and tracking.