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1 I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T E f f e c t i ve M u l t i c l o u d, H yb r i d I T Operations D e p e n d o n Au tomation and An a l yt i c s April 2017 Adapted from Effective Multicloud Management Strategies Support Digital Transformation and Business/IT Collaboration by Mary Johnston Turner, IDC #US Brought to you by Tech Mahindra, Powered by IDC IDC's research shows that over the next several years, the majority of enterprise-class organizations will rely on multicloud hybrid IT architectures that span public and private clouds as well as traditional physical and virtual infrastructure. Workload-specific characteristics such as performance, security, compliance, and business priorities will impact decisions about which cloud options are used to support an organization's DevOps and digital business strategies. This Technology Spotlight discusses the management capabilities enterprises will need to optimize the cost and performance of hybrid, multicloud environments in the era of DevOps and digital transformation. The paper also considers Tech Mahindra's Managed Platform for Adaptive Cloud (mpac) and discusses how it addresses these emerging multicloud enterprise IT management needs. Introduction IDC forecasts that at least 50% of net-new IT spending will be cloud-based by For most organizations, this spending will be driven by broad-based digital transformation strategies, including not only DevOps initiatives designed to speed up innovation and enable continuous application updates but also the use of big data, social networking, and IoT technologies. For many organizations, the number of annual application and API code releases may increase by as much as 50% often moving from quarterly or semiannual releases to monthly or even weekly deployments. With every application rollout or update, IT infrastructure needs to be able to adapt and react as end users engage and drive up transaction volumes and computing requirements. To support this type of unpredictable flexibility, many enterprise IT organizations are looking to cloud computing to provide automated scaling, resource pooling, and pay-as-you-go consumption-based cost controls. IDC expects that as a result, over 85% of enterprises worldwide will commit to multicloud architectures that encompass a mix of public cloud services, private clouds, community clouds, and hosted clouds. By the end of 2018, more than 50% of enterprise-class businesses will subscribe to more than five different public cloud services and will continually add, expand, contract, and drop subscriptions based on business needs. Each cloud will provide a different set of services, SLAs, and economics. IT organizations will need to carefully match workloads and cloud to optimize end-to-end business performance and end-user experience. In these types of multicloud environments, enterprise cloud management organizations need to proactively monitor infrastructure and application performance, optimize spending, maintain regulatory and business policy compliance, and proactively anticipate changing resource requirements. Cloud managers will be expected to provide developers and line-of-business (LOB) teams with unified access to multiple cloud services using a consistent self-service interface. US

2 To be successful, IT operations teams must evolve beyond managing operating systems and components to managing complex, rapidly changing multicloud environments using unified automation platforms, end-to-end monitoring, and state-of-the-art IT operations analytics. Benefits of Unified Multicloud Management IDC's research shows that three-quarters of enterprise IT decision makers expect to implement a unified set of management and automation capabilities to coordinate and optimize application and infrastructure performance across all enterprise cloud and noncloud IT infrastructure resources. Most of these organizations expect they will need to purchase net-new management software and services to replace, consolidate, or extend existing IT infrastructure and application management tools. They will also need to update processes and workflows, redefine operational roles, and implement more collaborative business, developer, and IT governance strategies. As shown in Figure 1, 85% of enterprise cloud managers expect that they will need to invest in new cloud resource provisioning, migration, and automation solutions and new cloud service brokering and analytics. Application performance management, public cloud service monitoring, and predictive, proactive capacity management are also top priorities. FIGURE 1 Top 5 Multicloud Management Priorities by 2020 Q. What are your current functional priorities in terms of purchasing net-new management solutions to support cloud between now and 2020? Cloud resource provisioning, migration, and automation Cloud service brokering and analytics Application performance management (APM) Public cloud service monitoring and control Capacity planning/resource utilization optimization n = 169 cloud users who expect to need new management solutions for cloud Source: IDC's Multicloud Management Survey, July (% of respondents) To ensure that their organization's multicloud management strategy is ready for whatever the business requires, enterprise IT teams need to invest in solutions that can monitor, provision, and optimize multiple clouds on a consistent basis. IDC recommends that cloud management platform buyers consider the follow capabilities when evaluating potential solutions: Support for existing cloud and noncloud IT resources to enable a smooth transition and cloud evolution over time Unified data modeling and analytics across compute, storage, network, and applications IDC

3 Full-stack configuration modeling and dependency awareness to ensure performance and compliance with corporate standards Support for continuous update and release of patches and updates as needed with minimal downtime End-to-end performance monitoring and analytics Prebuilt templates and provisioning content as well as easy-to-use tools to develop custom content Robust visualization and graphical analysis and reporting tools to support a range of operations, developer, and LOB roles To make effective use of unified cloud management platforms, IT, business, and LOB teams need to align on configuration standards, best practices workflows, usage and access control policies, and end-to-end business SLAs. IT teams need to focus on the delivery of multicloud services using service levels and cost models that can balance on-premises or hosted private clouds and available public cloud options. Increasingly, API-based integration between on-premises and public cloud services will allow IT teams to more easily integrate, normalize, and evaluate performance, capacity, and costs across multiple cloud options. For many organizations, the journey to effective multicloud management may start with the introduction of more modern, automated best practices across existing virtualized environments and then gradually extend to include public or private cloud infrastructure monitoring, management, and control. The vital applications running on established physical and virtual systems need to be able to adapt and respond to fast-changing end-to-end application environments where rapid changes to mobile or web-based front-end systems may result in significant changes to the capacity and performance demands placed on established back-end resources. The business will benefit in many ways from implementation of a unified multicloud management strategy, including: Improved business agility as a result of faster application development and update life cycles More optimized infrastructure spending as resource usage is better matched to business needs More consistent application performance and end-user experience, resulting in improved employee productivity and customer loyalty Overall improvements to business flexibility because of the ability to respond more quickly to changing business priorities The most successful organizations recognize that effective multicloud management ultimately requires a unified approach to traditional and cloud resources anchored by consistent, unified approaches to governance, standardization, and automation. This type of transformation requires more than the simple purchase of new management technologies. It also requires a platform that can evolve with the organization's needs over time. Many enterprises look for solutions that not only offer state-of-the-art automation, visualization, monitoring, and analytics but also can be implemented and supported by providers that can help introduce best practices, optimize workflow models, and provide significant configuration and automation content on day one. Considering Tech Mahindra's Managed Platform for Adaptive Cloud Tech Mahindra, a global software and IT service provider, offers mpac, a next-generation hybrid multicloud management platform (see Figure 2). mpac serves as an aggregation, integration, provisioning, customization, and management platform for cloud services that allows customers to utilize IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. mpac provides organizations a single interface to efficiently manage and 2017 IDC 3

4 control their on-premises resources or public cloud. Organizations also reportedly gain better visibility of performance and cost parameters of their infrastructure irrespective of private or public cloud. mpac is designed as a comprehensive hybrid multicloud management platform intended to meet enterprises' future requirements and challenges. According to the company, mpac is a complete turnkey cloud management platform backed by the strong services and operational IP of Tech Mahindra. mpac can help organizations: Transform legacy datacenters to adaptive infrastructure Improve time to market for business Enable the digitalization journey for enterprises Dynamically manage workloads with continuous capacity optimization overlaid with real-time cost optimization FIGURE 2 Tech Mahindra's mpac Platform SaaS Provider PaaS Provider Managed Platform for Adaptive Cloud (mpac) Public IaaS Hosted Software Service Provider 3 rd Party IaaS Provider On-Premise Private IaaS Hosted Private IaaS PRIVATE Legacy Data Center Infrastructure Source: Tech Mahindra, IDC

5 Features of mpac include the following: Single management pane. mpac provides a single window through which to manage private, public, or hybrid clouds. It has ready integrations with various public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, etc.) and on-premises infrastructure (Hyper-V, VMware, OpenStack, etc.). APIbased integrations with legacy datacenter systems enable mpac to configure, migrate, and monitor applications as they move from traditional IT to cloud. Consumption-based model. mpac enables IT to visualize actual units consumed by compute, storage, and network resources, which enables IT to charge back to internal departments. Actionable intelligence and application mapping. mpac provides real-time graphical intelligence into dynamically changing environments when public cloud services are introduced into enterprises. mpac shows real-time application flows, services, and underlying infrastructure for applications deployed in hybrid cloud. Public cloud cost optimization. mpac reduces public cloud cost by up to 35%, according to Tech Mahindra, by the smart sizing, scheduling, and distribution of resources intelligently without affecting the SLA of applications. Reporting and analytics. mpac provides utilization data in graphical format for capacity and resource planning and includes advanced features such as cost comparison and what-if analysis scenarios. Enabling DevOps and IoT initiatives. mpac automates the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. It has the capability to integrate with existing CI tools and create an application blueprint designer that can design the underlying infrastructure on the supported cloud platforms. mpac is designed to deliver an integrated, secure, and comprehensive platform for IoT service and operations management, thereby enabling digital/iot initiatives that a business wants to undertake. Cloud brokering. mpac integrates the different services from cloud service providers (public, private, and hosted) and helps in creating a service catalog with a self-service portal. This feature creates a single platform for provisioning and delivering services in an on-demand model to end users. The service catalog, customization, usage, access permissions, and metering can be managed centrally through a policy-based engine, thereby enabling a centralized management and governance capability. Challenges mpac is a comprehensive hybrid multicloud management solution designed to meet the needs of sophisticated enterprise IT buyers who are committing to broad, cloud-led transformation of IT operations and business strategies. For small, less mature organizations, mpac may be too complex for simple IaaS sandboxes and developer self-service projects. (In such a scenario, the organizations will need to avail Tech Mahindra's cloud advisory services to ascertain the relevant version of mpac that could be implemented.) mpac is a sophisticated offering aimed at midsize and large enterprises, multicloud environments that will benefit from Tech Mahindra's full portfolio of professional and managed services capabilities. For organizations seeking a complete turnkey cloud management platform, backed with strong services and operational IP, mpac can provide a unified automation platform to support a broad DevOps and digital transformation vision IDC 5

6 Conclusion IDC believes that as enterprise cloud environments mature, more and more cloud managers will look for unified monitoring, analytics, configuration, and automation platforms that can deliver full-stack applications and infrastructure services across multiple clouds using business rules and IT policies to drive deployment and migration decisions. Automation, integration, and analytics will be needed on a large scale to cost effectively maintain SLAs while accommodating increasing workload volatility and rapidly escalating volumes of data and analytics to meet business requirements. Customers considering datacenter modernization and simplifying multicloud management can leverage Tech Mahindra's mpac platform to reduce cost, streamline operations, and support collaborative business, developer, and IT service delivery. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I ON This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Custom Solutions makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests, contact the IDC Custom Solutions information line at or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document require an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC, visit For more information on IDC Custom Solutions, visit Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA USA P F IDC