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Making Cloud Services More Transparent

Lack of operational transparency and compliance information can keep organizations from relying on cloud deployments and slow down cloud expansion. Without clear usage reporting and operational data results, companies can be at a disadvantage. However, by providing greater transparency through shared metadata, cloud providers can help companies reduce a loss of business productivity due to outages, wasted resources and unexpected costs.

In the end, it’s up to these cloud vendors to provide the desired service levels for customers, to measure the real results, and to offer comprehensive reporting. Such proactive compliance goes a long way in dispelling customer uncertainty regarding the value of a cloud platform or service to their business.

Deficiency of current insight and reliable support for reporting this information can keep companies from expanding their cloud use. Typically, this metadata is easily available to cloud providers, but broad gaps exist when it comes to the knowledge customers require about their own workloads.

Most companies have a firmly established traditional IT data center where they maintain control of almost all the elements of application systems, resulting in effective isolation and relative stability. However, the increasing connectedness of compute systems has diminished stable boundaries. This is even more apparent in the cloud where systems boundaries are highly dynamic due to the constant shifting and introduction of new services and technologies.

For companies, achieving the same stability in cloud that exists within their own data centers requires a steady stream of feedback data. This cloud metadata includes the performance, configuration, operation, and billing information that are exclusive to each workload. Such reporting provides the necessary insight into application performance, costs, compliance, and the support services that organizations rely on.

However, some cloud providers, such as IBM SoftLayer, do provide customers with the power to manage and configure their own compute environment. Every SoftLayer server comes with monitoring resources, enabling customers to evaluate their cloud infrastructure performance as well as access more advanced monitoring options. In addition to tracking server logs and performance reports, customers can build their own server monitoring solution with SoftLayer’s full-featured API.

Without these kinds of options and levels of information, companies are not only challenged in many ways. Controlling costs becomes difficult, as does compliance, which is especially important for organizations involved in healthcare and finance or who work with the federal government. Cloud providers who offer proactive compliance also have the ability to quickly provide detailed reporting and audit support to resolve issues or prevent problems from occurring.

It’s important to mention that while risks related to lack of transparency may be present, a number of third-party vendors offer platforms with tools to deal with spend management, monitoring, and infrastructure management in the cloud.

And while reporting issues persist, it’s also useful to observe that a significant number of large customers are satisfied with their current cloud investments and performance levels. Yet as the cloud evolves, vendors will have to step up and provide the level of operational insight and granularity their customers require.

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