IT leaders are concerned about management of Cloud services, citing it as a major reason they haven’t already moved into Cloud Computing. IT Departments are resisting the move into the Cloud because it will mean they lose effective control over the application services.

Similar issues are always experienced with all major shifts in technology and most recently with the virtualization boom. It is always difficult to try and report on application and service performance effectively. Even if you have the tools, providing timely information to management can still be difficult. This is compounded even further when you start adding virtualization and Saas layers into the fold.

Big business will eventually see the value of Cloud computing, but not before the IT departments can effectively manage and report on the performance and availability of the core application services.

Some startup companies are addressing the hole in the Cloud management space. The most notable at the moment seems to be Hyperic.

The Hyperic offering provides monitoring and management for Amazon EC2 customers. Hyperic HQ 4.0 will help IT manage performance both locally and in Cloud based offerings.

I would expect that the next major release of the top performance monitoring and management software packages will also start to introduce the concept of Cloud based monitoring as well.

The benefit Hyperic HQ 4.0 to customers is the good transparency it provides about the inner workings of the Cloud service layers.

Like all good Cloud focused software it will offered as a Pay as you go subscription.

It is very important for IT and Business management to assess what level or management and reporting they want or need before launching into new technology. Application and Network admins will need new tools and need to develop new procedures to allow the effective reporting on external services.

[Via Cio.com]