Microsoft OMS turns up the heat on hybrid cloud management point solutions
- Summary:
- Microsoft turns up the heat on niche vendors as it fleshes out OMS. Kurt provides his analysis of the latest announcements.
As I wrote earlier this year when outlining Azure Stack, a private implementation of its public Azure service, Microsoft promises the tightest integration between cloud deployments spanning the public-private divide.
My contention then, after seeing and using Azure Stack in a lab environment, and now that a few more product details have emerged, remains that:
Microsoft’s growth strategy is an all-in bet on hybrid cloud, which it sees addressing business concerns like infrastructure, application and transaction latency, data sovereignty and control regulations and needs for customized infrastructure that can’t be met in a public, shared-services environment.
While Azure Stack provides a consistent technology platform for hybrid environments, Microsoft has also been building management software in the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS.) The OMS can span public and private clouds. In announcing the latest enhancements this week, Microsoft aptly calls OMS "management for the cloud, from the cloud."
A key piece of Azure's hybrid advantage is a common admin portal, Azure Resource Manager, for service configuration and deployment across public and private environments. Yet ARM doesn't address legacy systems nor provide the depth of monitoring and analytics that are required to manage large IT fleets.
That's where System Center and OMS comes in, the former a mainstay of Windows admins everywhere that works with OMS to support heterogeneous infrastructure that can include Azure, AWS, Linux, VMware, and OpenStack.
In releasing OMS last year as SaaS, Microsoft wisely sought to exploit the advantages in convenience, reach, scalability and efficiency of cloud-based software delivery using Microsoft's vast data center footprint, global reach and existing Azure infrastructure for a SaaS product that nicely fits hybrid deployments.
OMS is an intriguing combination of log collection and analytics with system configuration and automation that is troublesomely similar to standalone products like Loggly, Splunk and Sumo Logic, with enough feature overlap that it could cannibalize sales as customers realize they can combine log analysis and system management in a single product from a tier one vendor.
OMS basics and news
Superficially, OMS presents a dashboard that combines a graphical view of machine data and analytics with status information about system configuration, backup, site recovery, job automation and, as of this week security.
However, unlike traditional log analysis and intelligence products, OMS pairs system measurement with control: the ability to trigger configuration changes, deploy cloud resources, create backup jobs and manage failover to redundant disaster recovery sites.
One of the key features of the OMS preview release was the ability to digest, summarize, highlight anomalies and make actionable recommendations from machine data using a set of customizable dashboards. If that list sounds familiar, it's because the raison d'etre of log analysis point products is a similar ability to turn raw data into usable IT operations information.
Regardless of the product, two of the primary use cases of log analytics are troubleshooting and capacity planning: allowing IT teams to sift through terabytes of continually updated logs to identify the source of problems, pinpoint performance bottlenecks and develop optimal fixes.
However, in light of the growing sophistication, aggressiveness and business consequences of security incidents, so-called operational intelligence software has become an valuable tool in efforts to enhance security.
Recognizing the security potential of OMS, Microsoft just introduced a new plugin that integrates with the recently released Azure Security Center, as service similar to AWS Inspector that performs automated security scans, provides recommended service configurations and alerts to potential security incidents.
A decisive advantage of a cloud-based security service from a giant IaaS provider like Microsoft or AWS is its ability to draw upon the immense volume of security data and operational expertise of a public cloud. This capability allows Microsoft to identify threats individual customers might never see or have trouble recognizing given stealthy attacks that mask intrusion attempts within normal looking activities and space attacks over time.
The combination of data amassed from thousands of customers, conventional data analysis and machine learning allows services like Security Center to more efficiently flag attacks for all Azure customers.
The new OMS plugin brings this same capability to private systems. It achieves this by continuously monitoring hybrid environments for security vulnerabilities, holes like unnecessarily open ports or missing critical security updates and adherence to Microsoft's security best practices.
Having an integrated dashboard spanning private and public infrastructure, along with access to a global threat collection and analysis system provides OMS with a compelling advantage over conventional log management and analysis products.
My take
A Microsoft spokesman stated that the company doesn't see OMS as a competitor to log analysis point products even though there is some feature overlap since OMS has broader set of capabilities, including system configuration and automation. True, but I think this combination makes OMS a more formidable competitor to the likes of Splunk and Sumo Logic in the same way that Microsoft Office, by bundling good enough, if not (at least initially) category leading productivity products eviscerated the market for standalone spreadsheets and word processors.
Feature details aside, the other noteworthy element of Microsoft's latest management products is their support of and feature parity across public and private infrastructure. Admittedly, point products can also aggregate data from multiple environments, but by having an integrated analytics and management dashboard, OMS exemplifies Microsoft's commitment to hybrid clouds.
As I wrote earlier this year,
Azure Stack represents the endpoint of a hybrid cloud strategy: the same technology stack available for rent as a shared service or for sale as a private cloud.
This month's announcement show Microsoft extending hybrid capability beyond raw infrastructure to the entire cloud management stack, which both differentiates Azure from its principal public cloud competitors and threatens traditional providers of on-premise operations management software. Given the rate at which Microsoft adds capabilities to Azure and its other SaaS products, I expect more niche providers to feel the heat as their cloud-savvy customers doubt the wisdom of paying for the same features twice.