This GigaOm Key Criteria report details the criteria and evaluation factors for selecting an effective incident and task management platform. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those criteria and evaluation factors. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading incident and task management offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these platforms to make a more informed investment decision.

The post Key Criteria for Incident and Task Management Solutions appeared first on Gigaom.

• You may be able to lower your operating costs or at least slow their rate of growth, while reducing or eliminating the expense of physical data centers.
• The ability to scale resources quickly means that the business can be more agile, responding to changing needs and expanding into new markets with less risk.

The benefits of cloud migration are not a given. For IT shops versed in the rhythms of on-premises operations, the transition to the cloud presents unfamiliar challenges. Selecting a cloud vendor is significantly different than the process of choosing a data center provider. And despite historical promises from service providers of increased agility, lower cost, and risk, migrating even a single complex application to the cloud is a major challenge. The obstacles range from the deeply technical to issues relating to operations and management, and to managing the change itself.

Whatever the reasons, organizations are constantly looking at their past migrations with the benefit of hindsight to answer the question, “Why didn’t I get it right the first time?” As the old Irish adage goes, “If you want to get there, don’t start from here.” This report helps you start from the right place, exploring the processes and technologies needed for a successful cloud migration. Three areas of focus are addressed:

• Base-level agreements between business units and IT
• Core and differentiating cloud provider capabilities
• Evaluating a provider in terms of required success factors

Success not only means addressing these needs, but also defeating potential roadblocks in advance. Let’s first consider what needs to be in place between IT and the business.

The post Key Criteria and Strategies for Cloud Migration Success appeared first on Gigaom.

Hybrid clouds are either the end goal or a transition method to get to a cloud-only hosting model. A CPM vendor that can manage your on-premises automation and orchestration needs as well as the cloud hosting provides a greater value than separate tools that only do either on-premises or public cloud deployments.

More comprehensive CMP vendors also manage storage, security, disaster recovery, system health and performance, and application lifecycle management. These are just a few examples of the functions that must now be managed across multiple planes while accounting for multiple, and often differing, requirements—e.g., cloud vs. on-premises, hardware vs. software, ephemeral vs. persistent storage.

As organizations move more applications to the cloud, the need for a high-level “single view” of the entire infrastructure becomes critical to ensure uptime and high performance without compromising data mobility and security. A new role of cloud operations manager has evolved to oversee hybrid cloud deployments using CMPs. This role has evolved as a superset of responsibilities that include any lower-level roles that manage a cloud contract or data center.

There are three aspects to total cloud management:

1. Automation = CMP
2. Application performance optimization = Cloud Resource Optimization
3. Financial accountability = FinOps

This report focuses on the automation of cloud management platforms needed to support application deployments.

Figure 1: Three Aspects of Total Cloud Management

As hybrid cloud deployments are the new norm, businesses of every size are leveraging CMPs to streamline cloud migration and ongoing operational needs. Though these types of infrastructures introduce more complexity, they also create more

opportunities to deliver value, primarily by using best-of-breed solutions.

Previously, essential functions such as asset tracking and dependency maps ran in data centers with redundancy to mitigate fallout from environmental outages and ensure elevated levels of uptime. The move to cloud requires a new paradigm, however, in which “design for failure” becomes an application requirement and not the infrastructure mandate.

The fact is, today the hardware is ephemeral, and we can’t use a physical server’s asset tag to track where an application is running, which is how traditional management tools worked. The move to virtual machines (VMs) on-premises and now to the cloud means that the focus must be on the business problem or solution itself and that other attributes be treated as short-lived. CMPs can manage the types of storage and flag inconsistencies in deployment requests to policy governance to ensure the type of storage and the characteristics of storage match the business expectations and governance requirements.

A CMP’s ability to track services at a high level is critical to the multi-year management needs of IT as organizations move to hybrid and multiple clouds.

This report evaluates key vendors in the cloud management space and equips IT decision-makers with the information they need to select providers according to their specific needs. We analyze the vendors on a set of key criteria and evaluation metrics, which are described in-depth in the Key Criteria Report for Cloud Management Platforms.

The post GigaOm Radar for Cloud Management Platforms appeared first on Gigaom.

As a result of needing to create a new, future-facing gaming platform, the company realized it needed to rethink its development and deployment approaches along the lines of Agile and DevOps practices. Positive outcomes include:

• Significantly increased deployment times
• Faster delivery from a more agile, collaborative team
• Greater visibility and happier engineers

The post Upping the Game appeared first on Gigaom.