Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Other as-a-Service Options in the Cloud

In case all the hundreds (if not thousands) of SaaS options aren’t enough, a plethora of as-a-Service models are springing up around the cloud. There are service providers to help you manage your cloud and secure your cloud environment. There are providers to help you deploy desktops in the cloud. The list goes on. This section provides some examples.

Monitoring and management as a service

Is what you see what you get? Maybe. That’s why companies using SaaS need to do some of their own monitoring to determine whether their service levels have been met by their SaaS providers. Even more complicated is when companies are using more than one SaaS application in a hybrid model (refer to Figure 6-1 earlier in this chapter). To complicate things even further, you must monitor not just a single application, but also the combination of applications.

Companies in the systems management space are positioning themselves for this world. Vendors come at this market from two different perspectives:

From the top down, large telecommunications companies are packaging their capabilities so they can help provide cloud management and monitoring.

You also see traditional companies that provide web-services monitoring now offering services that will tell you ...