Inside public and private cloud management

There are many good reasons to move to the cloud, including a much reduced maintenance and server-management workload — the provider looks after much of that. However, managing your data, applications and in-cloud platforms remain important tasks.

The three sorts of service you get from clouds are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is application based; Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), where you have a familiar environment that runs in the cloud; and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where you get access to some of the mechanisms that control the underlying provision of compute, storage and networking. Management gets more complex the further along this route you go.

Whatever you choose, and you could choose a mix of all of the above, you'll need to manage some or all of VM deployment/migration; app delivery to end points; resource, security and licence monitoring; user access and rights; and performance issues.

And just because something is in the cloud, it doesn't mean it doesn't need to be backed up, or is exempt from disaster-recovery planning.

Charles and Rupert look at how these issues apply to different cloud models, and to the major vendors.