Helping Customers After They Move to Multicloud

Orchestrating an IT infrastructure and all the applications running on it has never been easy, even when all of that ran in a single environment fully under your control behind the firewall in your data center. Keeping track of what applications are running where and on what systems has always been a challenge. In this new cloud-centric world, that job has become exponentially more difficult. Not only must the deployment, management, monitoring and optimization of these workloads and data be done in a distributed cloud environment, but in a highly diverse one that increasingly includes multiple clouds and their varying nuances from your own data center environment.

This is quickly becoming a multi-cloud world, with organizations drawn to the scalability, efficiencies and reduced costs that both on-premises and public clouds can offer them. They are relying on a combination of multiple public and private clouds for their environments, but managing all this can be a complex chore. Making the move into the cloud is difficult enough; the job doesn’t get any easier once the move has been made and you’re in the cloud.

Businesses have to modernize their applications to enable them to run in highly distributed environments rather than on monolithic stacks, and that will start to include transforming some workloads from virtual machines to containers. There are multiple cloud providers, which means deploying, managing, monitoring and connecting all these things that are housed in disparate locations. All this is happening in an environment that is no longer a single data center that you entirely control. These are mission-critical applications; you need to understand how they communicate, how to resolve the problem when one is broken. You’ve got 10,000 VMs, and you need to know their location and composition. There also is the increasing complex issue of managing costs – paying for compute, storage, transfer and platform services. In some places you pay by the hour or day; in others it’s by the month or by project; the software license may be brought to the provider or “rented” from them. Consumption models vary, compliance is an issue, authorization and access still need to be controlled.

Cisco Cloud Consume is one of four key pillars under company’s larger Multicloud strategy and is aimed at helping organizations embrace the many cloud choices that are desired to be used concurrently to migrate, deploy, manage, monitor and optimize their applications. Cloud Consume comprises two elements:

— AppDynamics is a tool that offers a diverse range of monitoring capabilities, from application and business performance through to the customer experience, from capturing errors to noting network requests and component interactions, including mapping the applications dynamically. These capabilities deliver visibility into the infrastructure to ensure that the servers, databases and networks support the applications running on top of it or the root cause of a problem can be pinpointed quickly.

— CloudCenter enables customers to create self-service multi-cloud environments with a “model once, deploy and manage anywhere” unique capability and move workloads to and from the cloud with initial and “day 2” management capabilities. These unique capabilities evolve a customer from highly prescriptive and fragile orchestration on a per-cloud and region basis they may have to offering applications and services that can be delivered to any cloud the customer chooses, even new ones that didn’t exist when the service was constructed.

With Cloud Consume, customers can easily manage their cloud-based workloads, gain greater visibility into their environments and manage issues and errors in a predictive rather than reactive way. And with Cisco, it’s done in a cloud provider-neutral way. Other vendors might work with one or two of the larger providers, but that means less flexibility and choice for the customer and their platforms are not as architecturally nimble to adapt as the cloud landscape matures. Cisco has a highly adaptable platform that will work with whatever providers our customers are using, and can easily add support for more providers as they come onto the market.

Getting to the cloud is only a portion of the challenge in embracing a multi-cloud world. Managing your environment once you are there can be just as difficult and complex. Cisco’s Cloud Consume offerings, with AppDynamics and CloudCenter, can make deployment, management and monitoring significantly easier and let your technology and innovations focus on business outcomes and not lose focus and time worrying about the cloud nuances.