This Technology Spotlight discusses the management capabilities enterprises will need to optimize the cost and performance of hybrid, multicloud environments in the era of DevOps and digital transformation.

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I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T
Effective Multicloud, Hybrid IT Operations
Depend on Automation and Analytics
April 2017
Adapted from Effective Multicloud Management Strategies Support Digital Transformation and Business/IT
Collaboration by Mary Johnston Turner, IDC #US41672016
Brought to you by Tech Mahindra, Powered by IDC
IDC's research shows that over the next several years, the majority of enterprise-class organizations
will rely on multicloud hybrid IT architectures that span public and private clouds as well as traditional
physical and virtual infrastructure. Workload-specific characteristics such as performance, security,
compliance, and business priorities will impact decisions about which cloud options are used to
support an organization's DevOps and digital business strategies. This Technology Spotlight
discusses the management capabilities enterprises will need to optimize the cost and performance of
hybrid, multicloud environments in the era of DevOps and digital transformation. The paper also
considers Tech Mahindra's Managed Platform for Adaptive Cloud (mPAC) and discusses how it
addresses these emerging multicloud enterprise IT management needs.
Introduction
IDC forecasts that at least 50% of net-new IT spending will be cloud-based by 2020. For most
organizations, this spending will be driven by broad-based digital transformation strategies, including
not only DevOps initiatives designed to speed up innovation and enable continuous application updates
but also the use of big data, social networking, and IoT technologies. For many organizations, the
number of annual application and API code releases may increase by as much as 50% — often moving
from quarterly or semiannual releases to monthly or even weekly deployments. With every application
rollout or update, IT infrastructure needs to be able to adapt and react as end users engage and drive
up transaction volumes and computing requirements.
To support this type of unpredictable flexibility, many enterprise IT organizations are looking to cloud
computing to provide automated scaling, resource pooling, and pay-as-you-go consumption-based
cost controls. IDC expects that as a result, over 85% of enterprises worldwide will commit to
multicloud architectures that encompass a mix of public cloud services, private clouds, community
clouds, and hosted clouds. By the end of 2018, more than 50% of enterprise-class businesses will
subscribe to more than five different public cloud services and will continually add, expand, contract,
and drop subscriptions based on business needs. Each cloud will provide a different set of services,
SLAs, and economics. IT organizations will need to carefully match workloads and cloud to optimize
end-to-end business performance and end-user experience.
In these types of multicloud environments, enterprise cloud management organizations need to
proactively monitor infrastructure and application performance, optimize spending, maintain
regulatory and business policy compliance, and proactively anticipate changing resource
requirements. Cloud managers will be expected to provide developers and line-of-business (LOB)
teams with unified access to multiple cloud services using a consistent self-service interface.

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To be successful, IT operations teams must evolve beyond managing operating systems and
components to managing complex, rapidly changing multicloud environments using unified
automation platforms, end-to-end monitoring, and state-of-the-art IT operations analytics.
Benefits of Unified Multicloud Management
IDC's research shows that three-quarters of enterprise IT decision makers expect to implement a
unified set of management and automation capabilities to coordinate and optimize application and
infrastructure performance across all enterprise cloud and noncloud IT infrastructure resources. Most
of these organizations expect they will need to purchase net-new management software and services
to replace, consolidate, or extend existing IT infrastructure and application management tools. They
will also need to update processes and workflows, redefine operational roles, and implement more
collaborative business, developer, and IT governance strategies.
As shown in Figure 1, 85% of enterprise cloud managers expect that they will need to invest in new
cloud resource provisioning, migration, and automation solutions and new cloud service brokering
and analytics. Application performance management, public cloud service monitoring, and predictive,
proactive capacity management are also top priorities.
FIGURE 1
Top 5 Multicloud Management Priorities by 2020
Q. What are your current functional priorities in terms of purchasing net-new management solutions to
support cloud between now and 2020?
n = 169 cloud users who expect to need new management solutions for cloud
Source: IDC's Multicloud Management Survey, July 2016
To ensure that their organization's multicloud management strategy is ready for whatever the
business requires, enterprise IT teams need to invest in solutions that can monitor, provision, and
optimize multiple clouds on a consistent basis. IDC recommends that cloud management platform
buyers consider the follow capabilities when evaluating potential solutions:
 Support for existing cloud and noncloud IT resources to enable a smooth transition and cloud
evolution over time
 Unified data modeling and analytics across compute, storage, network, and applications
83
83
84
85
85
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Capacity planning/resource utilization
optimization
Public cloud service monitoring and control
Application performance management (APM)
Cloud service brokering and analytics
Cloud resource provisioning, migration, and
automation
(% of respondents)

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 Full-stack configuration modeling and dependency awareness to ensure performance and
compliance with corporate standards
 Support for continuous update and release of patches and updates as needed with minimal downtime
 End-to-end performance monitoring and analytics
 Prebuilt templates and provisioning content as well as easy-to-use tools to develop custom content
 Robust visualization and graphical analysis and reporting tools to support a range of operations,
developer, and LOB roles
To make effective use of unified cloud management platforms, IT, business, and LOB teams need to
align on configuration standards, best practices workflows, usage and access control policies, and
end-to-end business SLAs. IT teams need to focus on the delivery of multicloud services using
service levels and cost models that can balance on-premises or hosted private clouds and available
public cloud options. Increasingly, API-based integration between on-premises and public cloud
services will allow IT teams to more easily integrate, normalize, and evaluate performance, capacity,
and costs across multiple cloud options.
For many organizations, the journey to effective multicloud management may start with the
introduction of more modern, automated best practices across existing virtualized environments and
then gradually extend to include public or private cloud infrastructure monitoring, management, and
control. The vital applications running on established physical and virtual systems need to be able to
adapt and respond to fast-changing end-to-end application environments where rapid changes to
mobile or web-based front-end systems may result in significant changes to the capacity and
performance demands placed on established back-end resources.
The business will benefit in many ways from implementation of a unified multicloud management
strategy, including:
 Improved business agility as a result of faster application development and update life cycles
 More optimized infrastructure spending as resource usage is better matched to business needs
 More consistent application performance and end-user experience, resulting in improved
employee productivity and customer loyalty
 Overall improvements to business flexibility because of the ability to respond more quickly to
changing business priorities
The most successful organizations recognize that effective multicloud management ultimately
requires a unified approach to traditional and cloud resources anchored by consistent, unified
approaches to governance, standardization, and automation. This type of transformation requires
more than the simple purchase of new management technologies. It also requires a platform that can
evolve with the organization's needs over time. Many enterprises look for solutions that not only offer
state-of-the-art automation, visualization, monitoring, and analytics but also can be implemented and
supported by providers that can help introduce best practices, optimize workflow models, and provide
significant configuration and automation content on day one.
Considering Tech Mahindra's Managed Platform for Adaptive Cloud
Tech Mahindra, a global software and IT service provider, offers mPAC, a next-generation hybrid
multicloud management platform (see Figure 2). mPAC serves as an aggregation, integration,
provisioning, customization, and management platform for cloud services that allows customers to
utilize IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS. mPAC provides organizations a single interface to efficiently manage and

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control their on-premises resources or public cloud. Organizations also reportedly gain better visibility of
performance and cost parameters of their infrastructure irrespective of private or public cloud.
mPAC is designed as a comprehensive hybrid multicloud management platform intended to meet
enterprises' future requirements and challenges. According to the company, mPAC is a complete
turnkey cloud management platform backed by the strong services and operational IP of Tech Mahindra.
mPAC can help organizations:
 Transform legacy datacenters to adaptive infrastructure
 Improve time to market for business
 Enable the digitalization journey for enterprises
 Dynamically manage workloads with continuous capacity optimization overlaid with real-time cost
optimization
FIGURE 2
Tech Mahindra's mPAC Platform
Source: Tech Mahindra, 2017
PRIVATELegacy Data Center
Infrastructure
Managed Platform for Adaptive
Cloud (mPAC)
3rd Party
IaaS Provider
Public IaaSPaaS Provider
Hosted Software
Service Provider
SaaS Provider
On-Premise
Private IaaS
Hosted
Private IaaS

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Features of mPAC include the following:
 Single management pane. mPAC provides a single window through which to manage private,
public, or hybrid clouds. It has ready integrations with various public clouds (AWS, Azure,
Google, Oracle, etc.) and on-premises infrastructure (Hyper-V, VMware, OpenStack, etc.). API-
based integrations with legacy datacenter systems enable mPAC to configure, migrate, and
monitor applications as they move from traditional IT to cloud.
 Consumption-based model. mPAC enables IT to visualize actual units consumed by compute,
storage, and network resources, which enables IT to charge back to internal departments.
 Actionable intelligence and application mapping. mPAC provides real-time graphical
intelligence into dynamically changing environments when public cloud services are introduced
into enterprises. mPAC shows real-time application flows, services, and underlying infrastructure
for applications deployed in hybrid cloud.
 Public cloud cost optimization. mPAC reduces public cloud cost by up to 35%, according to
Tech Mahindra, by the smart sizing, scheduling, and distribution of resources intelligently without
affecting the SLA of applications.
 Reporting and analytics. mPAC provides utilization data in graphical format for capacity and
resource planning and includes advanced features such as cost comparison and what-if analysis
scenarios.
 Enabling DevOps and IoT initiatives. mPAC automates the continuous integration/continuous
delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. It has the capability to integrate with existing CI tools and create an
application blueprint designer that can design the underlying infrastructure on the supported
cloud platforms. mPAC is designed to deliver an integrated, secure, and comprehensive platform
for IoT service and operations management, thereby enabling digital/IoT initiatives that a
business wants to undertake.
 Cloud brokering. mPAC integrates the different services from cloud service providers (public,
private, and hosted) and helps in creating a service catalog with a self-service portal. This feature
creates a single platform for provisioning and delivering services in an on-demand model to end
users. The service catalog, customization, usage, access permissions, and metering can be
managed centrally through a policy-based engine, thereby enabling a centralized management
and governance capability.
Challenges
mPAC is a comprehensive hybrid multicloud management solution designed to meet the needs of
sophisticated enterprise IT buyers who are committing to broad, cloud-led transformation of IT
operations and business strategies. For small, less mature organizations, mPAC may be too complex
for simple IaaS sandboxes and developer self-service projects. (In such a scenario, the organizations
will need to avail Tech Mahindra's cloud advisory services to ascertain the relevant version of mPAC
that could be implemented.) mPAC is a sophisticated offering aimed at midsize and large enterprises,
multicloud environments that will benefit from Tech Mahindra's full portfolio of professional and
managed services capabilities. For organizations seeking a complete turnkey cloud management
platform, backed with strong services and operational IP, mPAC can provide a unified automation
platform to support a broad DevOps and digital transformation vision.

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Conclusion
IDC believes that as enterprise cloud environments mature, more and more cloud managers will look
for unified monitoring, analytics, configuration, and automation platforms that can deliver full-stack
applications and infrastructure services across multiple clouds using business rules and IT policies to
drive deployment and migration decisions. Automation, integration, and analytics will be needed on a
large scale to cost effectively maintain SLAs while accommodating increasing workload volatility and
rapidly escalating volumes of data and analytics to meet business requirements.
Customers considering datacenter modernization and simplifying multicloud management can
leverage Tech Mahindra's mPAC platform to reduce cost, streamline operations, and support
collaborative business, developer, and IT service delivery.
A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N
This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein
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