Cloud management platforms: what they do, and how to choose one for hybrid and multi-cloud
Once a company runs more than one cloud plus its own servers, the hard part is seeing and governing all of it in one place. That's the job of a cloud management platform.
Gartner predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach through 2027. In practice, that means a mix of one or two public clouds, some on-premises servers and a long list of SaaS applications, each with its own console. Cloud management platforms try to put all of that under one set of controls.
What a cloud management platform covers
| Area | What it should do |
|---|---|
| Inventory | Find and list every resource across clouds and data centers |
| Governance | Apply policies, such as allowed regions, required tags and encryption, everywhere |
| Cost | Show spending by team and service, with budgets and alerts |
| Security and compliance | Check configurations against benchmarks and flag drift |
| Automation | Provision, patch and update resources consistently |
| Monitoring | Track health and performance in one view |
Few products do all of this equally well. Most companies combine a platform for governance and operations with specialist tools for cost management and security.
Native tools reach further than they used to
The large cloud providers now extend their own management tools beyond their clouds. Microsoft's Azure Arc, for example, brings servers and virtual machines outside Azure, Kubernetes clusters running anywhere, and SQL Server instances into Azure's management system. Once connected, those resources can be inventoried, governed with Azure Policy, monitored and updated with the same tools used for Azure itself. AWS and Google Cloud offer comparable hybrid management options.
If one cloud is clearly your main platform, its native hybrid tools are often the simplest and cheapest route. Third-party platforms make more sense when no single cloud dominates, or when you want to avoid tying management to one provider.
A checklist for choosing
- List the environments you need covered: which clouds, which on-premises platforms, which Kubernetes distributions.
- Decide the main job. Governance, cost and automation lead to different products.
- Check how it handles identity and permissions, so the management platform doesn't become a single point of compromise.
- Ask how it is priced: per resource, per node or by spend, and model it on your estate.
- Run a trial on real accounts, including the messiest one.
What IT teams should do
- Count how many consoles your team uses to manage infrastructure today.
- Define three policies you want enforced everywhere, such as required tags, allowed regions and encryption.
- Trial your main cloud's native hybrid tools before buying a third-party platform.