https://www.techtarget.com/searchcloudcomputing/feature/Top-enterprise-hybrid-cloud-management-tools-to-review
Modern hybrid cloud frameworks extend public cloud services into private infrastructure. While these capabilities make building a hybrid cloud easier, the bigger challenge is assembling a tool set that enables effective management of hybrid cloud infrastructure and workloads over the long term -- specifically, by helping to streamline tasks such as hybrid cloud administration, performance optimization, cost management and security.
Correct tools are essential, especially as hybrid cloud becomes the default deployment model. According to VMware's "Private Cloud Outlook 2025: The Cloud Reset" report, 92% of enterprises run a blend of private and public clouds. Additionally, 75% of respondents said this blended approach is an intentional strategy, which suggests that organizations value the flexibility of a hybrid cloud environment to meet specific use cases.
In recent years, public cloud vendors have rolled out a new generation of frameworks for hybrid cloud creation -- most notably, Azure Stack Hub and HCI, Azure Arc, AWS Outposts and Google Cloud Anthos. At the same time, more conventional hybrid cloud management platforms, such as VMware Cloud Foundation and Cisco Intersight, continue to thrive. In addition, Kubernetes can be useful as a platform for hybrid cloud management, especially for organizations that use Kubernetes services, like Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere, to manage workloads deployed on private infrastructure using Amazon's managed Kubernetes service.
These platforms provide a centralized way to deploy and administer workloads across a cloud environment that mixes private infrastructure with public cloud resources. Integration between these entities is a significant improvement over earlier hybrid cloud architectures, which more closely resembled a private cloud and a public cloud running side by side. Modern tooling has made creating a hybrid cloud environment easier than ever.
Yet, hybrid cloud management remains a major challenge, and the platforms and frameworks mentioned above don't fully solve it. They simplify and centralize the deployment of public cloud services on private infrastructure, but they don't always address hybrid cloud management requirements, such as workload provisioning, log aggregation and analysis, and governance enforcement. These tasks often require additional functionality beyond what's available in hybrid cloud frameworks.
Hybrid clouds are, by their nature, especially complex and not fully centralized. Because they mix private and public cloud infrastructure and services, they make it harder to centralize monitoring and management than would be the case with a cloud environment that includes only private or only public resources.
Hybrid cloud management demands an especially deep level of visibility. Visibility ensures that organizations have an accurate, continuously updated understanding of the status of all their cloud infrastructure and workloads, including both the private and public cloud components.
The lack of effective hybrid cloud visibility can create challenges, such as the following:
The hybrid cloud management landscape is complex. Tools have overlapping functionality. And, since there are multiple approaches to implementing a hybrid cloud architecture -- such as building it directly on top of cloud infrastructure or using a platform like Kubernetes as an abstraction layer -- not all tools apply to all hybrid cloud configurations.
That said, hybrid cloud management tools are generally categorized as one of three types of tools:
The first category of management tools consists primarily of public cloud services that can extend into hybrid cloud environments. For example, if AWS Outposts is used to build a hybrid cloud architecture, the AWS public cloud's standard management tools -- including CloudWatch and CloudTrail -- can be used to help monitor the hybrid environment and manage logs. The Azure Stack suite of products provides a similar experience by integrating with Microsoft Azure public cloud's standard monitoring tools. Anthos does this as well, using Google Cloud Console.
Platforms such as VMware Cloud Foundation and Kubernetes can be tied into some public cloud vendors' services, too. But, for the most part, they don't extend public cloud management tooling into hybrid environments. Instead, users manage hybrid environments via the native tooling that's built into the platforms, such as kubectl on Kubernetes. That said, some integrations between these platforms and public cloud platforms exist. For example, it's possible to use the AWS Identity and Access Management framework to govern some permissions within Kubernetes environments hosted by using Amazon EKS, a Kubernetes service available through the Amazon cloud.
Because of limitations in native hybrid cloud management tools, it's sometimes necessary to add third-party management tools. These tools can offer broader, richer functionality. They also offer the advantage of working across multiple cloud platforms at once, which is usually not the case when using cloud provider tools. This capability makes third-party hybrid cloud tools useful for businesses whose cloud strategy includes multiple public clouds in addition to a hybrid cloud.
Hybrid cloud management isn't just about digital assets. It also extends to the physical hardware that hosts hybrid clouds. It's necessary to keep track of the servers, which hardware resources they provide and whether they're adequate to meet the hybrid cloud architecture's needs. Cloud providers have extended their reach to on-premises by bundling hardware with services and linking back up to their clouds. These products eliminate the need for an enterprise to manage physical infrastructure. But, sometimes, there are tradeoffs.
For instance, with AWS Outposts, the servers must be acquired directly from AWS. On other hybrid cloud platforms, however, a company typically purchases and manages its own hardware.
Hybrid cloud management tools represent a complex ecosystem that has evolved significantly in recent years through acquisitions and new product launches. The evolution is likely to continue, making it important to keep up to date with the hybrid cloud tooling landscape.
At present, key vendors and offerings include the following:
The tools should work with all parts of the IT infrastructure and cover all related management needs -- something that native management tools built into hybrid cloud frameworks sometimes can't do.
Given the wide selection of hybrid cloud management tools available and the varying use cases they support, organizations should weigh a range of factors when considering options. These are some key areas of evaluation:
Chris Tozzi, senior editor of content and a DevOps analyst at Fixate IO, has worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator with particular interest in open source Agile infrastructure and networking.
Editor's note: This article originally published in 2023 and was updated in 2026 to include more hybrid cloud management tools.
02 Mar 2026