Many businesses are using cloud applications to improve day-to-day operations in the enterprise. But while the trend has been sweeping IT departments nationwide, it isn’t without its problems.
Plenty of businesses haven’t integrated cloud applications and business functions, and operational inefficiencies are abound. Information silos, which emerge when data is kept in separate servers and can’t interact with other systems, grow each time a department deploys another application – and the result is lessened agility and an overall reduction of efficiency. In fact, 84 percent of IT executives surveyed say they’ve been unable to get the best of out their departmental cloud applications, and 54 percent cite integration as a major problem.
But a new software-as-a-service solution may eliminate these problems once and for all. Today marks the public launch of CloudAware, the first socially-enabled cloud management tool for the enterprise. The solution detects and broadcasts cloud changes to all employees, helping them to quickly identify non-compliant changes and eliminate cloud silos.
With CloudAware, IT departments have access to features including auditing, compliance, backup, intrusion detection, cost control, and more. They can build a service layer on top of providers like Amazon Web Services and ensure cloud and non-cloud applications are monitored by default -- eliminating manual work under one unified monitoring platform.
CloudAware uses Saleforce’s Chatter to post data into 10 feeds, where users can subscribe or pick and choose among individual applications, stacks or policies. CloudAware automatically posts cloud changes to the security feed, where the team can then collaborate and comment around the issue to implement a fix. Analytics provide developers, engineers, managers, and financers with flexible reports to monitor alerts by severity, time of day, and system. In addition, change management modules provide data on approval rates, number of changes, and approximate wait time for review.
CEO Mikhail Malamud was personally commissioned by two Fortune 500 companies to create the management system for their own use. But now it’s helping a number of companies using the SaaS beta version to cut their release cycles, reduce costs, and improve service level agreement timeframes.
Keep your eye on this platform as it continues to innovate and make major improvements to enterprise cloud integration. CloudAware’s highly social underlay just may mean the beginning of nixing cloud silos once and for all.