Enterprise scale cloud management
CloudHealth is thrilled to announce the General Availability of FlexOrgs and Advanced User Permissions. As businesses grow in scale and complexity, they need more powerful ways to manage and delegate control of their cloud environments. The Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) is a primary example of groups experiencing this pain. Given its typically small size, the CCoE needs tools to minimize manual work and to empower teams and departments to act in a controlled and trusted way. Without these tools, members of the group are forced to make difficult and costly decisions about where to invest their time.
Enterprises are consistently facing these challenges:
- Continuous increases in scale and complexity. With hundreds of cloud consumers across the distributed enterprise, consuming thousands of different services across multiple clouds and deploying hundreds of changes a day, the scale of cloud operations is beyond the complexity that traditional tools or processes can handle.
- Limited ability to delegate to lines of business. The only way to effectively manage and govern a cloud environment at scale is to delegate management activities to individual teams and lines of business. In this model, the CCoE should remain as the centralized point of control and visibility, while distributed teams perform day-to-day operational management. However, existing solutions don’t map well to increasingly complex organizations.
- Lack of contextual data for decision making. In order to enable effective decision making, businesses need to be able to context-switch quickly and hone in on the most relevant information, keeping the signal to noise ratio as low as possible. In today’s cloud management solutions, it’s challenging to get the right information to the right people at the right time.
CloudHealth is attacking this problem head-on. With the release of these features, customers will have the ability to reflect the reality of their organization and leverage our powerful reporting and insights within that context.
Tackling user permissions
An enterprise employee has a complex set of responsibilities and wears different hats in different parts of the organization. For example, a Cloud Program Manager within a BU is often responsible for administering the CloudHealth reports within its BU but also contributing to recommendations or savings estimates to the global CCoE. In this case, the individual would be a full administrator in their BU Org, while existing as a standard user with the ability to perform only what is necessary at the global scope. It’s impossible to define someone like this with a single set of permissions without granting much more access to the platform than would be required to fulfill their responsibilities.
CloudHealth’s advanced user permissions provide the capabilities for an administrator to capture these nuances and delegate them to those closer to the details. All of these capabilities are backed by a powerful set of APIs to ensure that a customer can programmatically extend their environment. Keeping your sources of truth connected to CloudHealth ensures continuous governance and control of your environment. User Groups leverage SSO mappings to take the rich information about group membership and extend that to authorize your users into the right data segments with the right permissions.
Mapping organizational hierarchy
FlexOrgs represent a new version of the CloudHealth platform for organizations that want fine-grained control over user access, sharing, and delegation across multiple levels of organizational hierarchy.
With FlexOrgs, you build and manage your organization’s structure as a hierarchy composed of multiple organizational units. For instance, when I, as a Product Manager at CloudHealth, log in to see my product line costs I don’t want to have to filter through all of VMware’s cloud data. Given the scope of VMware’s product portfolio, it’s difficult, and potentially dangerous, for me to see all of that data. VMware now has the ability to reflect each BU, like CloudHealth, as its own FlexOrg, thus providing isolation and the ability to govern the content. In this model, when I log-in to CloudHealth I see only the data within my BU to drive faster, more accurate decision making for the products I manage. VMware administrators can manage and share content in the same way we communicate internally, delegated from a single pane of glass and reflective of our existing budgeting and reporting lines.
Each organization unit is assigned access and responsibility for managing resources through the CloudHealth Platform.
- Hierarchical representation: Define organizational units that are responsible for managing specific portions of your cloud infrastructure. Link these organizational units into a hierarchy that reflects how management control should be delegated.
- Segmentation: Segment your infrastructure by organizational units in the hierarchy so that each unit has an isolated view of its portion of the infrastructure.
- User access: Map users to specific organizational units and control their levels of access in each organizational unit.
Benefits of using CloudHealth FlexOrgs
FlexOrgs represents the first major release to empower Enterprise’s cloud management at scale. It is the first step towards fully empowering the CCoE to view and govern their technology consumption at the current rate of change. The successful execution of cloud governance at scale is an incredibly complex problem and enterprise’s need the tools to represent their business to effectively find the sweet spot between cost control and cloud autonomy. We believe that a platform should reduce complexity and drive effective decision making into your organization. With FlexOrgs we invite you to join us on that journey.
Read More about this feature and contact your Technical Account Manager with questions!
