...‘virtual sprawl’

- MaxCloud provides a complete view of corporate Amazon Web Services and IT infrastructure for monitoring and optimisation

Corporate users of Amazon Web Services (AWS) can now have complete visibility of their cloud computing operations with the launch of MaxCloud, a new monitoring service from ControlCircle.

Research from the Cloud Industry Forum highlights that 79 per cent of CIOs want a single monitoring solution to oversee all IT operations but only 30 per cent of CIOs perceive that they have this capability today.

In response, MaxCloud provides IT management with a holistic and unified view of their estate, bringing transparency to the infrastructure. This ensures that organisations can maintain control of quality, governance and expenditure, enabling them to correlate IT spend and value.

This service is designed to provide confidence both to organisations moving to the cloud and to cloud-based companies that have experienced increasing complexities as their IT infrastructure continues to grow. With business-critical portions of the infrastructure too important to host outside the organisation, a hybrid cloud environment has become the natural arrival point for many companies. This has generated demand for a more sophisticated monitoring capability, such as MaxCloud.

“We hear of many companies that have moved to the cloud and, in the process, coined phrases like ‘virtual sprawl’ to describe the complicated infrastructure they have created,” explained Carmen Carey, CEO at ControlCircle. “Carefully monitoring your public and private cloud environments, each with their unique requirements, is crucial. Cloud assets should be treated just like any other asset, they are computing resources used to do a job and must be monitored and managed. It is this vital piece that is missing for many organisations.”

MaxCloud uses the cloud provider’s native APIs to provide a secure way to monitor and control cloud assets throughout their lifecycle, providing a real-time view of configuration and performance data through dashboards, along with reporting capabilities. In typical cloud instances, they are controlled and monitored through the APIs made available by the cloud provider.

With the monitoring, management, integration and automation capabilities of MaxCloud in place, the cloud can be deployed opportunistically and managed alongside data centres.

Specifically, MaxCloud can:

- manage dynamic resources in real-time for private, public and hybrid clouds
- report on availability and performance of business-critical applications in any cloud
- use public cloud providers’ native APIs for real-time views of performance
- manage cloud expenditure, enabling estimates of cloud computing costs at any given time
- assist with multi-tenancy management, and visibility into chargeback / billing, all through a single solution

MaxCloud can be deployed alongside MaxAnywhere to provide an integrated solution which unifies cloud and data centre management, providing visibility and control of IT resources, no matter where they are located.