Are you frustrated managing your private, hybrid, public or multi-cloud environment? Is the tool you have now not working for your environment today? If you’re thinking about switching vendors and don’t know where to start, or if you’re using a cloud management tool but not sure of all the capabilities, the VMware Cloud Management Buyer’s Guide can help you with both situations.
The reason I bring up evaluating your current capabilities is because I often hear from our customers they didn’t even know their existing solution could do something for which they are seeking. Therefore, evaluating your current tool’s capabilities is just as important as preparing to evaluate new options.
How can this guide help me?
Infrastructure and operations teams have been embracing multi-clouds of private, hybrid, and public cloud architectures, and each cloud is becoming a new silo to manage. Leaders are demanding – they want monitoring and analytics to optimize the environment, better cost controls, and an energized IT staff. You’re just trying to gain visibility, troubleshoot across all the silos, and maintain governance. This guide can help you, as well as your management team, because it’s one of those that has some key nuggets for everyone, including:
- A way to understand the shortcomings of your current IT operations
- Checklists (not just one, but multiple) to base your evaluation on the right criteria so you don’t have to determine that on your own
- Questions to ask before choosing a solution or to evaluate the capabilities of your existing tool
- Recommendations from industry leaders that have been sought out and now available all in one place
What’s in the guide?
The guide provides a logical process to help organize your thoughts and suggests how to get started, including:
- Assess: Current IT operations management solutions
Review a table with the most common IT operations challenges. If you answer “yes” to three or more of the issues, continue through the document to evaluate if your current tool can truly meet your goals.
- Evaluate: Criteria for a modern IT operations solution
Review four tables worth of features to see what makes up a modern solution and start prioritizing which capabilities are most important to your team, including performance optimization, capacity and cost management, intelligent remediation, and integrated compliance.
- Prepare: Develop questions to ask vendors as you compare solutions, existing or new
Use the 23 questions to get you kick-started asking your vendor, partner, or your own team information as you compare solutions.
- Identify: Your team’s skills and address any gaps
Your organization is unique, and so are your skill sets. Begin reading these articles with advice about developing a culture of innovation, overcoming cultural bias, and creating leaders through active mentoring.
- Analyze: Review your current processes to adopt new technology
These articles from peers may help you evaluate processes as you adapt new technology, including running datacenters as clouds, AI as a paradigm shift, and how the most security-conscious industries adopt clouds.
What are the basics?
When deciding if you want to keep your current cloud management tool or switch vendors, don’t forget to ask the common questions. Those include asking the vendor (or your channel partner) about the types of customers, financial stability, product vision and (dare you ask) the roadmap, as well as the price.
How to get started?
In the VMware Cloud Management Buyer’s Guide you’ll see a suggestion that won’t be in other cloud management guides. Don’t forget to look at the people and processes in addition to the technology – whether it’s existing or new – to be truly effective. Ultimately, the product should fit into your cloud strategy and your culture to meet the needs of your organization.
For information about VMware vRealize Operations, go to https://www.vmware.com/products/vrealize-operations.html. Or, sign up now to participate in the vRealize Operations Cloud beta program at https://cloud.vmware.com/vrealize-operations-cloud
