CloudSphere vs VMware Aria Automation comparison

CloudSphere is an intelligent cloud management platform that enables organizations to plan, optimize, secure, and scale their cloud adoption. The platform has three solutions to help organizations manage dynamic, multi-cloud environments, including cloud migration planning, cloud cost management, and cloud security posture management. By using application intelligence (AI), the platform is able to discover and collect all of the data points that collectively define an application across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Because the solution is very scalable, it can accommodate companies of all sizes.

The CloudSphere solution is ideal for:

• SMBs
• Enterprises
• Government
• ISVs
• Managed service providers

CloudSphere Product Highlights

• CloudSphere has a unique data science approach to hybrid and multi-cloud cyber asset management that offers the only solution to automate the discovery and creation of a top-down, application-level graphical view of your organization’s cyber assets.

• With its continuous application graphing, CloudSphere can save countless hours and provides the visibility to optimize your IT environment without triggering unforeseen business risks or disrupting other applications.

• The platform’s visualization capabilities accelerate cloud migration, transformation, and modernization initiatives with real-time insights and optimization recommendations.

• CloudSphere’s security posture monitoring minimizes cyber security exposure and reduces risk from misconfigurations.

• Automating compliance monitoring for corporate policies and key industry standards makes reporting extremely easy. The solution’s context-aware policy engine builds on the platform’s continuous visibility capabilities to display real-time compliance status and reports.

CloudSphere Features

CloudSphere has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Access controls/permissions
• Billing
• Provisioning
• Capacity analytics
• Cost management
• Demand monitoring
• Multi-cloud management
• Performance analysis
• Service level agreement (SLA) management
• Workflow approval

CloudSphere Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing CloudSphere. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Reduce migration risk: With CloudSphere, you can migrate complex applications with agentless discovery of application interdependencies while optimizing for both cost and performance.

• Manage your budget more efficiently: CloudSphere generates reports and provides alerts for cloud spend by group, department, project, or individual so you can keep your organization’s budgets on track.

• Access controls: With CloudSphere’s visual maps, identity and access data is displayed to show who has access to key cloud resources.

• Minimize attacks: The solution helps your organization establish better security and minimize cloud attack surface and your exposure window by using customizable risk scoring, remediation recommendations, and integration with 3rd-party reporting tools.

• Ensure compliance: CloudSphere allows you to control cloud security risks and ensure compliance in complex hybrid and multi-cloud deployments with real-time visibility, continuous configuration monitoring, and user controlled auto remediation capabilities.

• Comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications: CloudSphere gives you a comprehensive end-to-end view of your applications, regardless of your apps’ complexity, in order to provide optimization and accuracy throughout the migration process.

• Policy-driven controls for cloud spending: The CloudSphere platform provides policy-driven controls for cloud spending along with visibility so you can properly budget for cloud usage and tie cloud infrastructure spending to business outcomes. The solution enables you to set and track budgets, configure alerts, allows users to take corrective action from trend reports, and helps you optimize cloud spending with continuous resource monitoring and rightsizing suggestions.

VMware Aria Automation is a cloud management tool that allows companies to simplify their cloud experience through a modern automation platform. The solution is designed to deliver self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based security and infrastructure management. It helps organizations improve IT agility, efficiency, and productivity through its various features. 

VMware Aria Automation has multiple use cases that include the following:

• Self-service multi-cloud: VMware Aria Automation can be used to deliver consistent self-service consumption. Another use case in this area is for delivering infrastructure across VMware Clouds as well as public clouds.
  
  
• Multi-cloud governance: The solution can be used to manage cost, performance, networking, configuration, and security at scale for multi-cloud environments. VMware Aria Automation offers all this with an everything-as-code approach.
  
  
• DevOps for infrastructure: Through VMware Aria Automation, companies can enable a powerful infrastructure as code platform with support for iterative development and infrastructure pipelining.
  
  
• Kubernetes automation: Users can utilize VMware Aria Automation to automate the management of Kubernetes clusters and namespaces with support for vSphere with Tanzu.
  
  
• Security operations: VMware Aria Automation facilitates event-driven automation to deliver full-service IT system compliance enforcement and vulnerability remediation.

VMware Aria Automation Features

VMware Aria Automation has various features that allow users to easily perform operations. Some of the solution's capacities include:

• VMware Cloud agnostic template: This feature allows organizations to use a single cloud template to deploy with Infrastructure as a Code. Deployment options include VMware Cloud as well as major public cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more.
  
  
• Extensibility and customization: This VMware Aria Automation feature allows users to get full extensibility and customization. This can be achieved through Aria Automation Orchestrator, Action-Based Extensibility (ABX), and built-in integrations with common third-party tools.
  
  
• Self-service multi-cloud: This feature enables users to request and provision infrastructure resources. It can be done across clouds using a unified and consistent Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consumption layer, idempotent REST API, and self-service catalog.
  
  
• Centralized policies and governance: VMware Aria Automation offers a feature for users to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, automated remediation, and cloud environment visibility.
  
  
• Configuration management: Through this feature of the product, day 1 and 2 control can be achieved for virtualized and cloud environments. This can be done with intuitive configuration automation, compliance enforcement, and vulnerability remediation.
  
  
• Infrastructure pipelining: Through this feature, organizations can access user-friendly release automation pipelines. They can be specifically tailored for CI/CD in infrastructure use cases.

VMware Aria Automation Benefits

VMware Aria Automation offers its users various benefits. Some of the biggest advantages that the solution brings to companies that utilize it include:

• VMware Aria Automation provides faster time to market for companies through offloading manual tasks with advanced workflows and agile templating.
  
  
• The solution offers high levels of security and control.
  
  
• This product is suitable for beginners, as it offers a self-service consumption experience for users.
  
  
• VMware Aria Automation accelerates innovation through Infrastructure as Code and DevOps principles.
  
  
• The product provides users with flexibility, as it is compatible with the most popular public cloud solutions.
  
  
• The solution offers fast deployment because of all natively integrated functions.

Reviews from Real Users

Awais J., CTO/CEO at a tech services company, likes VMware Aria Automation because it saves a lot of time, provides more visibility, and has extensive automation capabilities.

An IT consultant at a government rates VMware Aria Automation highly because the product gives you flexibility to analyze and consume resources.