What options exist for IT infrastructure management services?

An IT industry analyst article published by SearchITOperations.

What kinds of as-a-service IT management options are available? Are IT management services only coming from startups, or do established management software vendors have options?

Mike Matchett

Various companies offer IT infrastructure management services hosted and operated in a remote, multi-tenant cloud. This as-a-service model provides core IT management services to private, on-premises data centers, remote offices, rented infrastructure in colocation or other infrastructure as a service hosting, or some hybrid combination of these deployments.

As an early example, when Exablox launched, it targeted IT shops generally seeking to squeeze the most out of constrained storage budgets — organizations that would gladly give up the pain and cost of installing and operating on-premises storage management in favor of just using a cloud-hosted storage management service. This approach radically evolved call-home support based on daily data dumps into online operational IT management as a service.

At that time, some businesses were dismissive of the idea that IT infrastructure management services would not require operational software they could directly host in their own data centers. Some forward-thinking startups, such as VM management provider CloudPhysics and the deeper infrastructure-focused Galileo Performance Explorer, noted that large companies would consider remote performance management tooling, as it’s based on machine data and log files with little risk of exposing corporate secrets. And performance management activities don’t sit in the direct operational workflow.…(read the complete as-published article there)