One of the realities of managing IT in the cloud era is that the applications and systems that need to be managed now exist both inside and out of the data center. The problem that creates is that IT organizations are frequently asked to manage each cloud computing instance using tools that are designed for that specific environment.
With the recent release of HEAT 2013, FrontRange added tighter integration with external applications to enhance workflow across multiple systems, a revamped user interface, and support for additional Web service application programming interfaces (APIs) to make it easier to populate services requests and perform advanced searches across multiple systems.
According to Kevin J. Smith, vice president and general manager of the FrontRange cloud business unit, HEAT 2013 is the only IT service management (ITSM) platform that was designed from the ground up to manage IT both on-premise and in the cloud. In contrast, rival vendors are trying to either re-write ITSM tools developed for client/server systems or are requiring organizations to adopt an additional set of tools to manage specific instances of cloud computing.
FrontRange, contends Smith, argues that IT organizations should be able to rely on a single set of ITSM tools to manage multiple environments.
Built on top of a multi-tenant platform, FrontRange gives IT organizations the option of deploying HEAT 2013 on premise or in the cloud. The basic idea, says Smith, is to give customers as much flexibility as possible when it comes to deployment models because over time their requirements are likely to change.
As cloud computing continues to evolve, there’s almost no doubt that IT organizations are going to find themselves struggling to cope with what amounts to an extremely extended enterprise. What will be required to make such computing environments manageable are ITSM platforms that can operate effectively at the highest level of abstraction.
