‘Cloud Management as a Service’ or CMaaS means being able to take full advantage of the opportunity to outsource the management of a cloud infrastructure to an experienced provider. The main driver of this choice is flexibility, as well as the adoption of a more agile management system.
Organizations need the “Cloud” to capture business opportunities through a modern architecture. Being able to manage the cloud, however, entails a number of investments, not only in cloud management platforms, but also in the in-house skills needed for continuous cost and performance optimization.
The CMaaS proposition, therefore, is intended to provide organizations with certain results and predictable expenses, along with, above all, the opportunity to be able to focus investment and resources on what matters most-that is, growing the business-without detour.
Cloud Management as a Service according to Gartner
Back in 2020, Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/4-trends-impacting-cloud-adoption-in-2020) stated that cloud optimization is an integral part of migration projects. That is to say, without an integrated management path, organizations risk having an inadequately exploited opportunity on their hands.
Indeed, the risk is that, without a CMaaS and in the absence of in-house tools and expertise, organizations will put off migration further, waiting until they are ready to manage it themselves. Waiting any longer, however, would be a mistake: the cloud is the great opportunity to make infrastructure and associated costs more flexible.
Cloud Management as a Service versus “do it yourself”
The obvious advantage of a CMaaS system over an in-house solution is being able to quickly gain access to a wealth of tools and expertise that, otherwise, the company, on its own, would not be able to have at its disposal as effectively and immediately. Organizations face an increasingly challenging scenario, which forces them to accelerate digital transformation projects: being able to tackle them in the right way and without smearing is often too onerous a path for many companies, if undertaken without the support of a specialized partner.
Migration is only the first step in the journey. Then, a logic of continuous improvement takes over, dictated by the need to monitor the performance of cloud instances, data and applications, to optimize costs and infrastructure.
The task of the service provider is to play the role of mediator between the organization and the vendor, ensuring that cloud management is aligned with the interests of the company and the business case that prompted it to initiate the migration path
In practice, the provider takes care of workload management, through advanced performance and data flow monitoring tools, so as to constantly optimize the infrastructure and ensure that the organization takes advantage of the flexibility of the cloud in the best possible way.