CloudSphere Reviews

We generally use it for cloud transformation. We have used the cloud discovery phase and cloud assessment and optimization in the cloud transformation.

The feature I like the most is the SaaS-based tool that can be used for discovery. We do not need to install any appliances or any agents. It's an agent-less tool.

The discovery is the most valuable feature. It’s where we'll be able to get the dependencies and where we'll get the in and outbounds as well.

The area they need to focus most on is the capability of assessment and the landing zones. It’s lacking right now.

Cloud transformation has four to five cases, including planning, discovery, assessment, and the MVC, which is called the minimal viable cloud. That comes with the architecture design or landing zone creation, where we will create resources on the cloud which we are provisioning. If we are moving onto the cloud platform, AWS, or zero GCP, we need an account. We need resources to be able to compute the network. Most organizations have their landing zone process and know how to create the resources account, compute the network layer and the security layer. However, this landing zone creation is not there in CloudSphere as a feature. It cannot create any of the cloud providers' accounts or their network security computing as a part of the orchestration layer. That orchestration layer is missing in this product.

It will not discover all the applications, although they also have the catalog. They are constantly announcing their catalog to identify applications based on the service which we are discovering. 50% of the time, the application will discover automatically. However, for the other 50%, we need to find the application based on its running process. That's the automation method that we need to follow and that they call blueprint. We need to create those blueprints and then we need to tag those applications. That is the one process that takes time when we do the discovery. One of the cons of this product is that it will not discover all the applications running.

It will not discover SAP or some kinds of applications that are running on those inside the application of the servers as well.

When we start the scanning of, for example, 500 servers, it will not handle the scan. We need to differentiate the jobs - for example, one job for 100 servers, a second job for another 100 servers, et cetera. We cannot scan the 1,000 servers together. That causes it to take time.

There’s a graph missing. It shows where all the servers have interdependencies; however, when we do actual work, it will not work properly in terms of what we present to the customer.

I’ve used the solution for five years.

No product is perfectly stable. There are some bugs in terms of discovery. However, their product team is working on that. Beyond that, the product is very stable and reliable. I've never seen any downtime in this product.

The product is scalable. For example, if a customer needs to scan or discover a thousand servers and they have 10,000 servers, we would need to have multiple setups concerning the server scans.

I scan the servers and would need multiple CloudSpheres set up as well. I can scale them up very fast. How you need to scale depends on the number of servers. That said, you cannot scan a thousand servers together. It will take time to scan and gather the data.

Still, I’ve never seen a customer requirement that has not been filled. It's always filled the customer requirement.

We have 15 to 20 people using the product currently.

I’ve delivered 20 to 25 projects. We have used approximately 35,000 to 50,000 licenses.

Technical support is very supportive. They have 24/7 support across teams. They use the agile method and have ticketing. You can clock a ticket based on the issue, and you will get a response quickly based on priority and severity. Their support model is perfect.

Positive

It's an easy setup process. It’s one of the easiest ones to set up. I’d rate it five out of five in terms of the ease of deployment.

It will take hardly two to five days. It depends on the customer and the sources which are needed. We can have one VMware instance or any number of instances where we can deploy the appliance. Then we need to activate those appliances and integrate them with this as a portal already on the cloud. Later, we will need to take a customer’s inventory or network. Based on that, we need to do some OP alpha testing or beta testing. If everything is fine, we can also start the scanning process.

The ease of the process depends on the people. If people understand the setup, it’s easy. If they don’t know it, they need to follow the SOP and then the guidelines. If they are technical, it won’t be hard for them to follow the steps.

I've done multiple implementations. I know the ins and outs of the implementation.

I’m an integrator. I can help clients implement the solution.

It's not a free tool, so you need to take the license support from CloudSphere.

The cost varies from company to company. It depends on how that model will be used. It might be anywhere between $4 and $15 per license per month. It’s less expensive than other options.

There are products from Cisco like Cisco and Piston enterprise, like IBM Spectrum, BMC Through Site, Oracle Product Hub, et cetera.

Multiple products like Tidal, Azure Migrate, AWS Service Manager, and Discovery Manager exist. I evaluated and did POCs for all the other products as well. I evaluated the CloudSphere in the initial days four or five years back. CloudSphere is very mature and very effective. It is very detailed as well.

I’m a customer and end-user.

We are a partner of this product as well.

I’d rate the solution nine out of ten. In terms of discovery, it is good. However, in terms of other transformations, things like assessment TCO or migration planning, et cetera, are not there.

We are a Microsoft and GCP managed service provider, providing multiple kinds of services for managing the clouds of multiple customers with this product. We provide multiple logins for customers, and they create their own users into the PMP. We are partners of CloudSphere. I'm the Lead MSP and Senior DevOps Engineer.

It's great that we can create and deploy multiple tenants at the same time for Azure, AWS and DCP. We've created multiple tenants for managing the subject environment which is where this product is powerful. It's also very handy for auditing. When you go for the audit of either Azure MSP or AWS MSP, there is a certain point where cloud management comes in. CloudSphere in a general TMP manner works the best. It can actually integrate with multiple clouds and manage all customers.

We've had some problems and have been working with the development team to improve multiple issues. The cloud is improving but we're getting errors regularly. The cloud is sometimes very lazy and does not work in certain conditions for some services. They need to improve their development team. CloudSphere is not keeping up with the pace of the cloud and there are a number of services that can't be deployed using CloudSphere. They're things you can deploy from Azure or AWS because they have their own portals. But when you do the same thing from CloudSphere, it's not possible.

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

The solution is generally stable but after a couple of months it gets a little lazy, slows down, and there are multiple errors that pop up onto the screen. Stability could be improved.

Scalability is quite good. We've been able to add 1000 plus users to our MSP program.

When they deploy a new version, some services become unusable and the technical team has to do some patching. The technical support is very good although we generally have to wait a day or two to get a response. 

We don't install CloudSphere, we have an application running from their environment, and we just use the URL. Using it is kind of tricky at the start when you have to integrate the cloud environments. After that, it's easy. Everything is well labeled with descriptive headlines. The initial integration required some training from the software team so that all environments could be configured into one.

We purchase an annual per-tenant license.

CloudSphere is a good solution that works well. It can integrate with multiple clouds and manage all our customers. They still have a long way to go, but I think it makes things easier. It's essential to go through their documentation, otherwise it's quite tricky setting up the integration with the cloud. Once that's done, everything is very clear.

CloudSphere serves its purpose of managing multiple customers for multiple clouds for the MSP program. But there are issues with their upgrades and their support team is a little slow to get a handoff. Added to that is the slowing down of the software over time which requires some back-end work. Taking all that into account, I rate this solution seven out of 10.  

We have multiple customers that we onboard on multiple tools for inventory management and monitoring purposes, so we use CloudSphere as their CMP (Cloud Management Platform). If the customers have multiple infrastructures on multiple public clouds, they can manage those easily on CloudSphere because we give access to our customers, so they can access their infrastructures through CloudSphere.

When I started using CloudSphere, it wasn't mature, and it had multiple issues. For example, my team experienced server issues while using the solution, but recently, I noticed how much CloudSphere has improved.

There used to be some latency issues with CloudSphere. It even gave error messages in the past when you select an option such as "the web server is not responding", but it has improved a lot, and now I don't get any errors from CloudSphere.

What I like best about CloudSphere is that it has a lot of beneficial features, and it has a single pane for managing multi-cloud environments, which I find very helpful, and it's the main benefit you can get from CloudSphere.

The main issue I experienced from CloudSphere was recently resolved, but an area for improvement in the solution is that it lacks the functionality of migrating resources from one public cloud to another. If CloudSphere could provide that functionality, that would be very beneficial to users and companies.

CloudSphere wasn't as stable when we started using it, but nowadays, it's stable.

CloudSphere is a scalable solution based on experience because in the past, my company had multiple requirements, and CloudSphere was able to fulfill them.

Our experience with CloudSphere technical support was good. We had requirements to improve some of the technical functionalities, and we also had multiple issues accessing CloudSphere, so we opened multiple support cases. Though support took longer to get back to us, they did resolve the issue, so overall, we found support for CloudSphere good.

The initial setup for CloudSphere was straightforward, but it required more steps. You need to onboard the customer's infrastructure. You have to create the user account, then the tenant account, and then you have to integrate the subscription with CloudSphere. Setting up the solution requires multiple steps, though the onboarding isn't that complex.

I don't have any information on CloudSphere pricing.

I'm currently using CloudSphere.

My advice to anyone who wants to use CloudSphere is that it's a very good tool for managing multi-cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. You can have complete visibility and control over multiple resources using a single-pane solution such as CloudSphere.

My rating for the solution is seven out of ten.