Integrated Cloud Management

The distributed cloud can greatly enhance productivity, flexibility and cost-efficiency for both service providers and their customers, but the emergence of such a dynamic environment also puts a tremendous onus on a service provider's management system capabilities.

In some ways, the most important game-piece in the distributed cloud is the provider's service management system. "When you get down to it, automation through cloud management is probably the most important component of any cloud service environment," said Dor Skuler, Vice President, cloud solutions, at Alcatel-Lucent.

"A lot of telcos now are doing the land grab, acquiring and building out their data centers, but they also need to get their back office systems more integrated," added Camille Mendler, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.

An integrated management system is the key component in being able to simplify service provisioning and guarantee end-to-end SLAs, so it must be able to provide vision into all data centers and network facilities, and in a multi-technology, multi-service world support an integrated view of composite services.

Dor Skuler continues, "SLAs can't be in silos anymore, and you really need to look at this as a composite service universe, where all of the services required to connect an enterprise to a cloud system are treated as a single service from the consumer point of view."

"End-to-end infrastructure management is key," said Caroline Chappell, independent analyst at Heavy Reading. "That means a complete view from the WAN to the data center to the customer."

Chappell said that providing that single service view for customers is not as easy as just aggregating and their data in the cloud. "Carriers need to make better use of portals to make components pulled in from other providers seem as one--even if those components aren't under the carrier's control," she said. "They will need to support multiple clouds for the customer and multiple virtualization providers, allowing the customer to use native tools to manage their different virtual machines regardless of whether it's VMWare or someone else."

She said that degree of visibility, along the capability to provide customers with management control, is something that carriers can enable, but that most Internet-based public cloud providers are unable to support.

The integrated management system also needs to be automated to support dynamic provisioning of those services. In the cloud computing environment, the management system needs to have the awareness to view the entire network and data center systems as a broader resource pool, and it has to have the control functions to allocate those resources as necessary. "Vendors will need to provide service providers with the logic of how to do this," says David Frattura, senior director of strategy, cloud solutions, at Alcatel-Lucent.
"It's not just automation, but optimization that ensures the best possible deployment of a service based on attributes that may maximize profit."

To this end, Alcatel-Lucent is building intelligence capabilities into its orchestration engine to help service providers locate certain applications and content more closely to users who access them frequently.

Informa's Mendler agreed that orchestration, quite literally, is what service providers most need help with. "It's like being in a band and getting all the instruments to play together," she said, adding that service providers mostly have lacked the tools to help them do that thus far.

The time to perfect that orchestration is now, as the integrated management system will play an increasingly important role as enterprise customers migrate more applications to the cloud. As they grow to trust cloud services, enterprise CIOs will embrace the idea of converting mission-critical in-house resources and services to the cloud. The cloud management system is responsible for ensuring a smooth migration, and for providing ongoing protection of such sensitive data.

"Management tools need to adapt and change," Frattura said. "In the future, we'll see a hybrid cloud model in which enterprises see the service provider cloud as an extension of their own domain. They will support software-based cloud federation layers that allow customers to move workloads from one provider to another, and there will be APIs for them to request more capacity from the service provider on a dynamic basis by hooking into an integrated management system. "These responsibilities might make the management system sound like a police officer, assigned to both serve and protect, as well as direct traffic, but for enterprises there may be a more appropriate and readily available comparison: An integrated management system is the cloud's CIO.

As Informa's Mendler noted, "Most enterprises will not use one cloud, but several clouds for several applications. If telcos can allow them to move between those clouds, and grant them a view of all their cloud assets, they can deliver a higher value proposition."