Cisco CloudCenter vs CloudHealth comparison

The Cisco CloudCenter solution is an application-centric hybrid cloud management platform that securely provisions infrastructure resources and deploys applications to data center, private cloud, and public cloud environments.

With Cisco CloudCenter breakthrough application-centric technology, users
can:

• Model: Quickly and easily build a cloud-independent application profile that defines the deployment and management requirements of an entire application stack.

• Deploy: Use one click to deploy the application profile and related components and data to any data center or cloud environment.

• Manage: Apply a wide range of application lifecycle actions to set policies to enable in-place scaling, support cross-environment bursting or high availability and disaster recovery, and stop the deployment.

CloudHealth provides hybrid cloud management software designed to help organizations increase their visibility across public and private cloud infrastructure. The CloudHealth platform helps IT teams manage resources and costs across cloud environments.

Key Features of CloudHealth

The main features of CloudHealth’s platform include:

• Collecting data: The tool automatically collects and correlates data from your organization's cloud.
• Reporting and analysis: Your IT team can visualize and analyze collected data via custom reports and a central dashboard so you can monitor performance.
• Cost management: The platform allows you to monitor the costs of cloud computing resources so you can identify which user category spends the most.
• Governance and security: CloudHealth provides IT governance, automation, policy management, and authorization. A high level of governance helps keep your business compliant. There are several security tools included, like role-based access controls. The platform integrates with public cloud providers' security and monitoring tools.
• Integrations: The system integrates well with public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

Besides cloud management, CloudHealth delivers features to help with public cloud migration. For example, the platform enables you to calculate the total cost of ownership of a cloud deployment. You can identify which workloads you’ll move to the cloud first based on application dependencies.

Service Tiers

There are several editions of the service:

• CloudHealth advanced is geared for organizations that are still growing their cloud investment or haven’t achieved cloud management maturity yet in their journey.
• CloudHealth enterprise is geared for organizations that are advanced in their cloud transportation. This edition includes advanced capabilities.
• Cloud Enterprise plus is geared for organizations building a cloud center of excellence and requiring simplified financial management and streamlined operations.

Benefits of CloudHealth

• Simplifies financial management

You can report spending by cost center. This will drive financial accountability, thus lowering your cloud spending. It gives you visibility over who is using your cloud, with what device, and from where. It offers granular visibility into the public or hybrid cloud, monitoring cloud usage by line of business.

• Streamline operations

You can create custom policies to automate daily cloud operations. This reduces risk and accelerates decision-making. The granular visibility enables continuous monitoring of cloud usage and analysis of performance, resulting in more accurate capacity planning. It reduces risk and accelerates decision-making, identifying opportunities to increase cloud usage efficiency and reduce spending.

The CloudHealth platform improves resource utilization with custom rightsizing recommendations for your workloads. You can track performance and compare it with your provisioned capacity, thus optimizing your assets.

• Enhances security and compliance

CloudHealth empowers your cloud’s security posture with real-time visibility. You can detect misconfigurations based on security rules and custom policies. The platform enables you to prioritize issues based on quantitative risk scores and gives you visual context to investigate and remediate issues quickly. CloudHealth continuously tracks compliance scores with real-time detection audits. There is automated reporting for frameworks such as SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI. CloudHealth integrates with SIEM systems to provide visibility for security operations teams. The system can ingest data from cloud-native threat feeds, raise immediate alerts, correlate threats, and investigate issues.

Reviews from Real Users

Lorna L., Product Manager at a comms service provider, says, "We are able to create an internal price of the product that we can then sell to clients. We get the cost plan at a good discount and then resell it with a mark up to our enterprise-level clients. This flexibility in pricing is one of the solution's best features."

"The thing that CloudHealth does well is billing,” adds Mike S., DevSecOps Engineer at Cloudstronaut LLC.

A Director Cloud Program & Platform Strategy at Zones, Inc states that "The solution is good for cloud cost management."