Cisco CloudCenter Suite: Your Multicloud Management Champion

In a few days, over one hundred million viewers will experience the phenomenon known as the Super Bowl. As fans of championship sporting events like the Super Bowl or, for my friends outside of the US, the World Cup, we expect a gratifying experience during these events and are solely focused on our favorite team’s accomplishments. At this point, we don’t care how many practice sessions and training hours were involved, or how long it took the team to reach this level. Our only expectation is to witness a superb performance culminating in our favorite players lifting the trophy; little do we dwell on the inherent complexity of what it took to get there.

In reality, championship teams prepare for this “trophy lifting” experience for years by developing and executing a framework of specific components: talent (management, players, coaching, supporting staff), teamwork (working together), discipline (execute to the plan), and a little luck.

Now in cloud, the expectations of cloud consumers are similar to those of sports fans. They adopt cloud platforms to exploit their numerous benefits: accelerate innovation, increase scale, or reduce operational expenses. Increasingly they are adopting multiple clouds simultaneously to leverage the unique advantages that each of them has to offer. But the specific use case, whether it’s to manage hybrid cloud workloads or distributed multicloud applications, is just a means to an end for them.

But for organizations, it’s all about taking the championship team’s point of view. Because to truly realize the benefits of a multicloud approach, they need a cloud management platform (i.e. a framework) that works across many clouds, both public and private. One that provides the best finished product, while abstracting the inherent complexities.

The newly announced Cisco CloudCenter Suite does just that, via a single solution that works across multiple clouds, doing what many other tools do separately or only for specific clouds.

Cisco CloudCenter Suite is an integrated set of software modules that accelerates innovation by providing a framework for organizations to design, deploy, and optimize infrastructure and applications across clouds to achieve their cost and compliance objectives. The suite simplifies multicloud management by providing workflow automation, application lifecycle management, cost optimization, governance and policy management across clouds.

Cisco CloudCenter Suite is now a modular, self-managed, Kubernetes-based solution that gives you all the benefits of a microservices application without actually having to manage one. It consists of:

Three modules that work together to simplify multicloud management

Workload Manager – Multicloud management of infrastructure and applications that helps customers design, deploy, and optimize their on-premises and public cloud environments. Workload manager enables governance policies, aligned with the organization’s objectives, that provide centralized visibility and control to help customers improve their multicloud maturity.

Cost Optimizer – Cost reporting and remediation that analyzes customers’ consumption patterns on-premises and in public clouds and provides visibility into total cloud spend (compute, storage, network, and cloud services). It also identifies cost-optimization strategies to help customers right-size their cloud workload instances by minimizing overprovisioning.

Action Orchestrator – Simplified orchestration and workflow automation that provides seamless integration within the suite and externally through a broad set of adaptors and standardized interfaces. This simplifies business processes, reduces human error, and eliminates repetitive tasks associated with technical integrations and business processes.

Suite Admin – Central administration point for all CloudCenter Suite modules. It provides common services such as managing cloud accounts, multi-tenancy, licensing, monitoring and logging, role-based access control, user authentication, and single sign-on integration.

Suite Installer – A self-deployed, self-managed installer that takes care of the installation process for the Kubernetes-based CloudCenter Suite on any environment (VM, OpenStack, on-premises and in public clouds).

CloudCenter Suite delivers a ubiquitous experience across your multicloud environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud, so that you can focus on developing and deploying applications with speed and scale. At design time, architects can compose the dependencies of their multi-tier applications into an application profile. Designers can leverage numerous out-of-the-box integrations across many Cisco products and other ecosystem solutions to build on the strength of Cisco’s ever-increasing investments in cloud technologies. Consumers can then deploy the profile, devoid of multicloud complexities, using a pre-established governance framework consisting of application and infrastructure policies. Applications are delivered consistently and reliably across private and public clouds in a manner that eases the transition to operations teams. Both consumers and operators can optimize infrastructure and applications anywhere through a recommendation engine that exposes the most economical consumption opportunities.

CloudCenter Suite’s flexible consumption models enable customers to choose the buying option that best suits their organizations’ use case requirements and price points, with three subscription-based license tiers available as self-hosted or SaaS. Small and mid-size enterprises can now take advantage of the same premier multicloud management capabilities enjoyed by large enterprises.

How does CloudCenter Suite deliver “quick wins” for cloud consumers and IT operators? It helps teams:

Focus on accelerating innovation and reducing time to market by delivering applications wherever the cloud strategy dictates.

Capitalize on the unique benefits of each provider by easing the management of multiple clouds.

Reduce total cloud costs without compromising application performance by monitoring private and public cloud usage.

Automate complex business processes to reduce digital waste and precious time and resources.

Championship teams operate best when the unique skills of each team member seamlessly come together to accomplish a common goal. CloudCenter Suite unifies your multicloud experience in the same way—enabling you to secure the best value from the ‘skills’ each cloud provider has to offer.