What Is a Cloud Management Platform?
A cloud management platform (CMP) is an integrated software suite that enables organizations to manage, monitor, and optimize public, private, and hybrid cloud environments from a single interface. CMPs offer a consolidated dashboard that gives visibility and control over all cloud resources, workloads, and services, regardless of where they are hosted. Many CMPs are based on open source software, helping companies avoid vendor lock-in and customize their cloud management solutions.
CMPs typically connect to cloud services via APIs, which enable secure, real-time communication and data exchange between the CMP and various cloud platforms. By leveraging these APIs, CMPs aggregate data about resource usage, performance metrics, and system health across multiple environments, breaking down data silos and ensuring consistent visibility.
Consider the Benefits of Cloud Management Platforms
CMPs deliver a range of benefits for organizations operating in today’s complex cloud environments:
- Easier cloud management: By centralizing control and visibility, CMPs simplify cloud operations and significantly reduce infrastructure complexity, making it easier for IT teams to oversee and manage resources across multiple clouds.
- Deeper visibility: A key benefit CMPs offer is cost optimization by providing actionable insights into resource usage and spending. With real-time data and analytics presented through intuitive dashboards, companies can quickly identify inefficiencies, eliminate waste, and make informed decisions that lead to greater financial control.
- Improved security: CMPs help enhance security and compliance by enabling companies to enforce consistent policies, monitor compliance status, and respond quickly to threats or regulatory changes—all from a single interface.
- Smoother cloud migration: Additionally, CMPs empower organizations to accelerate cloud migration and adoption. By automating routine tasks and orchestrating complex workflows, they reduce manual effort and the risk of human error, allowing IT teams to focus on innovation and strategic initiatives.
Align Business and Technical Requirements with CMP Features
CMPs provide cloud tools and insights needed to efficiently manage, optimize, and secure cloud environments, supporting business agility and long-term growth. As companies consider their objectives, current infrastructure, and long-term strategy to determine their business and technical needs, it’s critical to evaluate key features so they can choose cloud management software that closely aligns with their requirements.
Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud Management
An effective CMP offers centralized oversight and control across all multicloud and on-premises resources, enabling unified provisioning, monitoring, and management from a single interface. Organizations should prioritize CMPs that seamlessly integrate with their current cloud environments and provide flexibility as organizational needs evolve.
Cost Management and Optimization
To effectively manage cloud resources, CMP software should include robust cost management and analytics tools capable of aggregating spending data from all cloud environments. These tools should also enable the identification of opportunities for optimization and accountability across departments. With a single source of truth, businesses can gain granular visibility into expenditures, which helps prevent budget overruns.
Automation and Orchestration
A strong CMP should help automate and orchestrate cloud management tasks to improve efficiency, consistency, and scalability through features including automatic provisioning, configuration, scaling, and managing life-cycle events. Organizations need to evaluate how CMP software supports orchestration with existing platforms, including cloud service provider (CSP) tools and container orchestration solutions like Kubernetes. These capabilities should ultimately help reduce manual intervention, minimize errors, and accelerate deployment cycles within a unified management environment.
Security and Compliance
Companies need to prioritize CMPs that offer comprehensive security controls aligned with their access management, authentication, and authorization policies. Seamless integration with monitoring and logging tools is essential for proactive threat detection and rapid incident response. Additionally, policy-based compliance management is crucial for monitoring and enforcing regulatory standards. Audit trails, detailed reporting, and automated compliance assessments further support ongoing governance and effective risk management.
Monitoring and Analytics
Organizations need a CMP that supports informed decision-making and enables efficient troubleshooting. Centralized dashboards deliver real-time visibility into resource health, use, and performance across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Continuous monitoring and anomaly detection enable automated alerting and rapid response to issues or performance degradation. Additionally, advanced analytics needs to be able to identify usage trends, anticipate capacity needs, and highlight optimization opportunities.
Self-Service Portal
Many CMPs offer a self-service interface that empowers developers, business units, and other stakeholders to provision and manage cloud resources independently without relying on central IT teams. An effective self-service approach can help companies accelerate innovation and respond more quickly to business needs.
Integration Capability
A crucial aspect for organizations when considering a CMP is assessing its integration capabilities with their cloud and enterprise systems. Support for APIs and connectors is vital for integrating monitoring, DevOps, security, and data management solutions—ultimately creating a cohesive and efficient cloud ecosystem.
Explore Cloud Management Platform Solutions
Cloud management platform vendors offer a range of solutions, including those delivered as Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). These platforms provide organizations with consolidated dashboards for visibility of workloads and cloud resources.
Red Hat OpenStack Platform
The Red Hat OpenStack Platform is an open source IaaS solution for building and managing private or public clouds. It offers modular services for compute, storage, networking, and identity management. The platform supports automation and orchestration of resources across on-premises and hybrid deployments, providing strong integration, security, and enterprise-grade support.
Intel and Red Hat actively collaborate to help maximize the performance, security, and efficiency of Red Hat OpenStack on Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel® networking, storage, and virtualization technologies.
Red Hat OpenShift Platform
Red Hat OpenShift Platform is an open source container application platform built on Kubernetes, designed to simplify the development, deployment, and scaling of containerized applications. It provides developers and IT teams with tools for building, testing, and managing cloud-native workloads, enhancing Kubernetes with automated scaling, advanced security features, and a user-friendly web console for platform management.
Intel partners with Red Hat to deliver Intel® Select Solutions for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform—preverified hardware and software stacks optimized for performance, security, and reliability. This collaboration helps organizations accelerate infrastructure evaluation, optimize price/performance, and drive digital transformation through agile, secure, and scalable DevOps practices.
VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware Cloud Foundation is a comprehensive IaaS platform that integrates VMware’s core technologies—vSphere for compute, vSAN for storage, and NSX for networking—into a unified solution for building and managing private and hybrid clouds. It offers automated self-service infrastructure, enabling developers to deploy virtual machines and containerized applications quickly.
Intel and VMware work together to optimize Intel® processor, memory, storage, and networking technologies for VMware Cloud Foundation. This collaboration enables companies to streamline infrastructure management across private and multicloud environments and help reduce total cost of ownership, all while helping maintain strict security, data privacy, and operational efficiency.
Microsoft Azure Arc
Microsoft Azure Arc provides unified management, governance, and monitoring across on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments by extending Azure’s control plane to resources outside of Azure. Organizations can centrally register, organize, and manage servers, Kubernetes clusters, and databases through a single interface, enabling consistent policy enforcement, security controls, and automation regardless of resource location.
Intel and Microsoft have partnered to optimize Azure Arc‒enabled hybrid cloud solutions, combining Intel® technologies with Azure Arc’s centralized management and security. This collaboration delivers high performance on validated systems for efficient workload orchestration across on-premises, multicloud, and edge environments.
Google Distributed Cloud
Google Distributed Cloud is a fully managed platform that extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure and tools to on-premises data centers, edge locations, and multicloud environments. Built on Kubernetes, it enables the scalable development and deployment of applications consistently across diverse environments, abstracting underlying infrastructure for a unified developer and operator experience.
With centralized management, policy enforcement, and real-time analytics from a single control plane, Google Distributed Cloud supports automation, regulatory compliance, and data residency requirements while leveraging the latest Intel® technologies.
AWS Outposts
AWS Outposts is a fully managed hybrid cloud solution that extends AWS infrastructure and services to on-premises or edge locations, delivering a consistent hybrid experience with seamless connectivity. It offers centralized management, automated maintenance, and flexible scalability, allowing organizations to simplify cloud migration and meet regulatory or performance requirements.
With AWS Outposts, applications and workloads can be run locally using the same AWS services, tools, and APIs as in the cloud. AWS and Intel have partnered for almost two decades to develop and support cloud services that help manage cost, complexity, and scalability. Intel® processors power many of the cloud computing services offered on AWS.
Determine Organizational Priorities When Selecting a CMP
When selecting a CMP, organizations should clarify their strategic priorities and ensure the solution fits their cloud environments—public, private, hybrid, or multicloud. It’s important to consider users’ technical expertise, the need for collaboration or self-service, and whether support for IaaS, PaaS, or both is required, since some cloud computing management software is tailored to specific service models.
Companies need to weigh open source vs. subscription-based platforms—balancing cost, flexibility, and support—while assessing the risk of vendor lock-in and integration with multiple cloud providers. Finally, deciding between a fully managed or self-managed CMP will impact overhead, customization, and updates. Aligning these factors with business and technical goals ensures the chosen CMP supports current and future needs.