The complexities that come with cloud computing go way beyond interoperability issues.
Cost is a significant factor as is performance.
What’s emerging from these forces are new services such as Digital Fuel and Nimsoft that are designed to bring meaning to the costs and the performance issues that come with cloud computing.
Digital Fuel is launching a a SaaS platform called IT Cloud Cost Management that provides a view into the costs that comes with cloud computing. Nimsoft, recently acquired by CA, provides performance management of a company’s cloud infrastructure and on-premise environments.
Digital Fuel CEO Yisrael Dancziger says people are looking at cloud computing in a similar way to how they viewed outsourcing. They see it as a cheaper alternative.
But over time, the costs to operate a cloud infrastructure will become increasingly complex as more factors become part of the equation. A company may have multiple cloud environments. Costs associated with security, compliance and other issues increasingly become factors to consider.
Digital Fuel provides a dashboard environment to give visibility and predictability of the costs to a business. The service is intended to provide a method for billing business units for the costs of specific services. For instance, it calculates “what if” analysis of the costs associated with cloud computing.
Nimsoft provides a performance a dashboard environment to view the actual performance of a cloud-based infrastructure and how it compares to on-premise systems. In April, the company launched an on-demand service for IT administrators to see a full view of services running in datacenters, hosted, remote and cloud based infrastructures.
Services like Digital Fuel and Nimsoft represent a new generation of companies that offer management services for cloud computing.
We expect these services will proliferate as cloud computing becomes increasingly mainstream.
