CloudHealth Technologies Extends AWS Management Reach

Looking to give managed services providers more granular control over cloud services delivered via Amazon Web Services, CloudHealth Technologies today added to its CloudHealth platform the ability to control AWS resources on a more granular level based on both operational costs and IT policies.

Lead by the team the developed the SilverBack managed services platform that was eventually acquired by Dell, the CloudHealth platform is built from the ground up to give MSPs the ability to manage instances of AWS on behalf of multiple customers via a single console.

CloudHealth Technologies CEO Dan Phillips said this latest update also gives MSPs the ability to split an AWS bill up across multiple customers, which enables MSPs to more easily customize each bill based on the total range of services the provided.

In general, Phillips said CloudHealth Technologies sells managed services for AWS directly to customers with over $100 million in revenue, while looking to MSP partners to address the rest of the market. CloudHealth Technologies now has 18 MSP partners selling AWS services, said Phillips.

Phillips said the core challenge that MSPs face in building a practice around AWS is that as a highly elastic IT environment most MSPs don’t have a platform in place capable of keeping up with the dynamic changes that customers routinely make on AWS. MSPs providing IT services around AWS need granular control over AWS services in a way that allows them to respond to the needs of customers that have embraced AWS not only to cut costs, but also take advantage of a much more agile IT platform, said Phillips.

The latest enhancements to the CloudHealth platform, said Phillips, provide the ability to apply policies to AWS in a way than enables MSPs to implement governance controls within that agile IT environment while at the same time invoking automation tools that serve to make the MSP more cost efficient.

Phillips added that while AWS currently represents the bulk of the cloud market, CloudHealth Technologies is currently beta testing a version of its platform that will support Microsoft Azure. Given the fact that most MSPs are going to wind up supporting multiple cloud service, Phillips said MSPs will clearly need a central management console to maximize profitability by minimizing support costs for MSPs that otherwise would have to build their own cloud management platform from the ground up. Not only does CloudHealth provide the core platform, Phillips notes that it manages all the constant updates that AWS makes to its platform on behalf of its MSP partners.

Like just about every IT organization on the planet, MSPs are struggling to adapt workflow processes to the cloud. For those MSPs that focus solely on the cloud making that adjustment is obviously going to be a lot easier than those MSPs that need to manage both on premise and cloud deployments. For that reason alone the channel is witnessing the emergence of a new class of MSPs that are borne of the cloud using MSP platform specifically designed for the cloud.