Understanding and Controlling Cloud Sprawl

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Within the data center community, server sprawl was an issue many administrators had to face and address. Virtualization helped consolidate many of those systems to create a leaner infrastructure. After a little while VM sprawl became the new challenge. With improved management and controls, managers were able to regain some virtualization real estate by tackling the VM sprawl issue, although many will insist that this issue still persists.

Now, with more WAN utilization, better underlying hardware components and more organizations moving to some kind of a cloud model, the IT industry is experiencing a new type of challenge: Cloud Sprawl…

Cloud computing has created numerous options for organizations and IT environments. New methods of delivering disaster recovery, improving backup and even expanding the data center are all reasons to move to a cloud model. Unfortunately, as with many new technologies, some control and management best practices aren’t being applied. Some organizations are departmentally deploying cloud instances without really understanding where their cloud platform is going. The other problem is that with too many uncontrolled cloud presences, security becomes a concern…

Read more from the source @ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/10/17/understanding-and-controlling-cloud-sprawl-2/