CloudSphere.AI: A New Vision for Multi-Cloud Governance

Enterprise cloud adoption continues at a massive scale and promises to be the most significant technology shift in this decade. The cloud has driven tremendous benefits for companies of all sizes. However, independent and decentralized teams of cloud architects, developers, QA engineers and solution architects are now making decisions that have material impacts on cloud spending and security. A variety of different products have been built to start to address these needs, but the lack of coordination between these disparate tool sets is leaving too many key problems unsolved. As a result, we see the markets for cloud migration planning, cloud cost management and cloud security posture monitoring rapidly converging into a single multi-billion dollar market. CloudSphere was formed as a merger between iQuate and HyperGrid specifically to go after this opportunity to provide governance for a multi-cloud world.

Prior to the merger, iQuate already had a significant partnership with HyperGrid, and when evaluating the long-term vision of both companies, we saw a number of areas where a merged company would accelerate development and add meaningful differentiation. The iQuate and HyperGrid roadmaps were strategically aligned and had minimal product overlap. By combining the capabilities of both companies, we will have a substantial head start on the competition as we build a multi-cloud capable Cloud Governance Platform that includes solutions for:

• Cloud Migration Planning
  • Reducing migration risk when planning a move to the cloud
• Cloud Cost Management
  • Eliminating surprise cloud bills with real-time proactive budget alerting
• Cloud Security Posture Management
  • Controlling access sprawl with unique cloud identity and access management

While there are other competitors in cloud management, the vision of where CloudSphere is heading is something I haven’t seen from anyone else in the marketplace. We need this bold, new vision because the shift to the cloud has obscured the IT department’s view into the cost, security and compliance of business applications. Cloud providers want to help, but they don’t offer a way to connect the dots between changes to individual application components like compute, storage, configuration and networking and the impact they make to the application as a whole. Furthermore, the dramatic increase in the number of people making changes to the application components in the cloud and the number of disparate products in the different environments make tracking application status in real time nearly impossible.

Our vision to solve these problems is Application Intelligence. Application Intelligence discovers and collects all of the data points that together define an application across on-prem, hybrid and cloud environments. It then correlates these data points into an application-centric view that provides a new way of managing a cloud environment. Imagine cloud migration planning software that allows application optimization before and after moving to the cloud, or cloud cost management software that tells you your projected cloud spend per application and lets you set budget threshold alerts to warn you if that projection is going to exceed budget. Imagine security posture management software that can show a chart with cloud identity and access information, displaying who has access to each of your critical applications in the cloud. That’s what we are building at CloudSphere, a Cloud Governance Platform that takes an application-centric view to dramatically improve how you manage the cloud. We have already made great strides in integrating the two companies’ product lines to build out application intelligence in our platform.

Combining the technology and go-to-market capabilities of these two innovative companies significantly accelerates the path for us to build a category-leading company for Cloud Management Platforms. We look forward to hearing from you if you are interested in learning more about our platform or our vision of elevating these solutions with our unique application-centric management approach.