Main takeaways from this article:
Cloud management refers to monitoring, maintaining, and operating on cloud-based data, apps, and infrastructure.
Managing cloud deployments helps organizations achieve business goals by addressing cloud sprawl, visibility issues, security threats, and regulatory requirements.
Cloud management comes from built-in cloud management platforms or integrable software-as-a-service models to access functionality.
Private, public, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments require different navigational strategies.
Effective cloud management depends on goal setting, platform selection, resource tagging, security integration, migration policies, and continual optimization.
What is cloud management?
Cloud management refers to the monitoring, maintenance, and operation of data, apps, and infrastructure hosted on the cloud. Private, public, hybrid, and multicloud environments all require cloud management tools to identify and track the performance and utilization of cloud resources.
Originally, IT teams managed cloud workloads manually, but it quickly became obvious that manual management was inadequate and inefficient for the highly dynamic and complex nature of the cloud. Organizations encountered challenges with data/infrastructure security governance, resource allocation, latency management, and dynamic resource provisioning in environments with intermittent real-time workload changes.
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Why is cloud management necessary?
Organizations transitioning to the cloud do so with certain goals in mind, like cost efficiency, faster deployments, improving service delivery, achieving greater accuracy, and increasing data resilience/availability. But these goals cannot be achieved without efficient cloud management because the cloud environment has the following challenges:
| Challenge | Description |
|---|---|
| Cloud sprawl | Cloud sprawl is the uncontrolled rise in cloud resources and instances. It occurs when the rapid expansion of an organization’s cloud services (resulting in the need for fast resource provisioning) is accompanied by poor cloud governance or decentralized management. Cloud sprawl hinders efficient resource tracking and results in excessive spending, wastage, smaller profit margins, and security risks. |
| Visibility | Cloud deployments comprise multiple first- and third-party components, including IaC, SaaS, and PaaS. Achieving end-to-end visibility into the content and performance of all these diverse cloud resources can be cumbersome without centralized cloud management. |
| Security and access control | Cloud management tools usually have next-gen security features baked into their suites. For example, many of them offer role-based access control (RBAC) authorization, which bolsters access management for the entire cloud infrastructure. |
| Compliance | Since multiple resources are usually domiciled in several distinct environments, assessing compliance is near-impossible without a platform that centralizes visibility and harmonizes governance of the entire cloud infrastructure. Cloud management tools serve this purpose. |
How cloud management works
To operate properly, cloud management relies on two primary approaches to access and manage cloud functionality:
Built-in third-party cloud management platform (CMP) tools, which supply suites for managing cloud infrastructure across native providers and services
Independent, integrable software-as-a-service (SaaS) CMP solutions, which supply suites for coordinating cloud infrastructure across a range of multiple providers and services
Built-in CMP tools are designed for organizations operating within a single-cloud infrastructure. They’re ideal for managing native resources but may fall short when operating in multi-cloud environments.
Independent CMPs are a solid choice for multi-cloud users because they offer flexibility and efficiency for diverse cloud services. These platforms are designed to coordinate resources and workflows across multiple providers, offering efficiency and value for organizations with complex or distributed infrastructures.
Both built-in and integrable CMP tools provide organizations with essential capabilities to streamline cloud management. These capabilities include:
Manage cloud resources from a single portal
Provision and de-provision of resources
Orchestrate workflows for provisioning, configuration, and deployment
Track and optimize costs
Apply security policies
Integrate apps into cloud environments
Gain analytics insights through reporting and dashboards
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Features of cloud management tools
A good cloud management platform offers a suite of features that help organizations optimize their cloud environments, reduce costs, and enhance security. These include:
Resource management
Cost management
Performance monitoring and alerts
Security and compliance
Automation and orchestration
Integration and interoperability
Resource management
Cloud management solutions streamline resource management by automating processes like resource discovery, inventory tracking, tagging synchronization, and provisioning/de-provisioning. This ensures cloud resources are used efficiently, reducing the risk of expensive cloud sprawl or underutilized assets.
Cost management
Cloud management platforms track and analyze spending across cloud resources, offering projections and detailed reports so organizations can stay within their budgets. By identifying inefficiencies and finding cost-saving opportunities, these tools empower businesses to maximize their return on investment.
Performance monitoring and alerts
Real-time dashboards and alerts keep cloud managers informed about resource usage, spending, and performance metrics. By tracking key indicators, teams can quickly address deviations from targets, ensuring their operational goals are met and resources are used effectively.
Security and compliance
CMPs integrate essential security features like identity and access management (IAM), role-based access control (RBAC), and encryption management. They work seamlessly with other security tools, helping organizations strengthen their cloud defenses and maintain regulatory compliance.
Automation and orchestration
Automation capabilities help CMPs to match workloads with adequate resources while successfully coordinating tasks. Automation reduces manual errors, speeds up deployment, and ensures consistency across configurations.
Integration and interoperability
CMPs support seamless integration with first- and third-party tools, including cloud storage platforms, hypervisor-based resources, and cloud security posture management (CSPM) solutions. These integrations allow organizations to manage all their cloud services and data through a unified platform, simplifying operations along the way.
Benefits of cloud management
Cloud management strategies offer organizations many valuable benefits, including improvements in:
Efficiency
Cost
Time to market
Security
Improved efficiency and app performance
CMPs' centralized monitoring, reporting, and alerting help stakeholders determine key resource allocation concerns, like
when to use and when not to use public clouds and private clouds (factoring in traffic spikes vs. cost considerations);
which instances or cloud components consume more/less resources, when, and why.
IT teams can also use CMPs to regulate resource consumption and requests per workload to boost app performance.
Cost optimization
The visibility that cloud management enables is critical for channeling financial resources into third-party tools and platforms based on their performance, utilization, and revenue/cost savings. Complete visibility also helps identify excess, abandoned, or underutilized resources for informed financial resource reallocation.
Faster Time to Market (TTM)
By automating service provisioning/deprovisioning, tagging, tracking, and reporting, CMPs reduce errors, improve product quality, and speed up product delivery.
Security and compliance
CMPs facilitate full resource control and governance, and as a result, they allow for effective cloud security, threat analysis and compliance assessment, along with implementation of endpoint security, IAM, and encryption.
Navigating cloud management in different cloud environments
Cloud management strategies are designed to meet the unique requirements and challenges of private, public, hybrid, and multicloud environments. Private clouds typically offer more flexibility but less scalability than public cloud services, while hybrid clouds offer more simplicity but more vendor lock-in risk than multiclouds. Here’s a breakdown of cloud management in each environment:
Private cloud environments
Private clouds use on-premises or offsite resources that are exclusive to one organization, offering complete control over configuration, security, and compliance. With these benefits come challenges like higher costs, scalability limitations, and potential vendor lock-in.
To manage a private cloud environment effectively:
Choose vendors carefully by reviewing their service-level agreements (SLAs) and security policies to ensure they align with your organization’s goals.
Implement best practices for configuring and securing private cloud resources to maximize their reliability and safety.
Public cloud environments
Public cloud service providers, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, leverage shared resources among multiple organizations. This supports on-demand provisioning and usage that can scale at any time, making public clouds a cost-efficient option for businesses. However, they often restrict customization to the provider’s framework and require strict adherence to their guidelines to prevent misconfigurations and security risks.
To manage a public cloud effectively:
Select vendors who support all your required operating systems and apps and whose policies and restrictions align with your goals.
Follow your vendor's guidelines for configuration and security.
Hybrid cloud environments
Hybrid clouds combine private and public clouds, divvying up the workload between the two. This environment offers the security and control of private clouds while leveraging the scalability and cost benefits of public clouds. Managing hybrid clouds can be complex, as it requires constant oversight to balance performance and cost.
To manage a hybrid cloud effectively:
Carefully plan which elements of your cloud environment you will allocate to your private cloud and which you will delegate to public providers.
Monitor your public cloud usage closely and scale up gradually to ensure your performance and costs stay aligned with your goals.
Multicloud management
Multicloud strategies utilize multiple public cloud providers in a public or hybrid environment. Many organizations opt for this strategy because it provides more flexibility and scalability at lower cost than using a single public cloud.
To manage a multi-cloud environment effectively:
Limit the number of public clouds you use to those necessary for specific purposes.
Strengthen your multicloud security with automated security tools and encryption.
Cloud management best practices
No matter which type of cloud environment you use, effective cloud management relies on following these best practices to ensure efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness:
Set clear management goals
Choose an effective cloud management platform
Use consistent tagging for resources
Integrate with security tools
Develop efficient migration policies
Continuously assess and optimize
1. Set clear management goals
Organizational goals should guide your practices, tool selection, and performance metrics. For example, deciding whether to host data on a private or public cloud often depends on your priorities for security, scalability, and cost. Once goals are defined, choose the tools that best align with your key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and measure success.
2. Choose an effective cloud management platform
Your CMP is at the heart of your cloud management strategy. The ideal platform should come from a trusted provider and should offer automation, resource tracking, and disaster recovery. Look for a CMP that supports:
Automated provisioning and orchestration
Real-time alerts for resource activity
Authentication and tracking of resource changes
Comprehensive disaster recovery capabilities
3. Use consistent tagging for resources
Tags act as metadata labels for your cloud resources, providing critical information such as workload names, sensitivity levels, or business priorities.
For example, label storage platforms for specific data types, like personally identifiable information (PII), Kubernetes instances, or Kafka clusters, to quickly distinguish and organize each one.
4. Integrate with security tools
Security tools should work cohesively with your CMP for comprehensive protection. An ideal security tool should:
Detect vulnerabilities across the entire cloud environment
Manage access control and identity security
Secure hypervisor-based resources
Isolate compromised components and proactively halt suspicious actions
5. Develop efficient migration policies
Cloud strategies often require migrations to leverage better performance or cost efficiency. Efficient migration policies can help you avoid headaches like data loss, downtime, or security vulnerabilities. Use your CMP to track and clean up abandoned resources after migrations for a cost-effective process.
6. Continuously assess and optimize
Cloud management is not a set-it-and-forget-it task. You should regularly assess your strategy using analytics tools from the CMP to verify that your organization's goals are being met and processes are running efficiently. Continuous reviews help to identify areas for improvement, refine practices, and adapt as business needs evolve.
Optimize your cloud management security with Wiz
Wiz provides complete visibility and advanced threat detection across your entire cloud environment. With agentless scanning, Wiz covers everything from PaaS resources and virtual machines to containers and serverless functions—all without disrupting internal or external operations.
Wiz’s Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) unifies critical security features, including:
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM)
Cloud Workload Protection (CWPP)
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Scanning
Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)
Our Security Graph provides a visual map of your cloud’s interconnections, highlighting potential breach pathways. Wiz’s Threat Center offers real-time insights into emerging and potential vulnerabilities, helping you stay ahead of threats and take action against them.
With powerful automation tools and developer-friendly integrations, Wiz streamlines security processes and integrates directly into your CI/CD pipelines, allowing you to identify and resolve risks before they ever reach production.
Every Solution. One Platform
Learn why CISOs at the fastest-growing companies unify their cloud security needs with Wiz.
Every Solution. One Platform
Learn why CISOs at the fastest growing companies unify their cloud security needs with Wiz.
