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.

I use the solution for our hyper-converged infrastructure within the organization for hospital management. We also access some of the integrated Active Directory and other integrated services related to Microsoft.

As a system administrator, the features in CloudSphere HyperGrid are very, very beneficial for me. The product is helpful for the management, optimization, and utilization of resources. I can handle the collaboration and manageability completely with my account.

The solution must have a single management console for the resources and VMs. There should be one portal.

My organization is using the private cloud services of the product. My organization has been using the solution for three years.

The tool is 100% stable. Though we used the product for three years, we implemented only two or three patches. It is very stable. It has a maximum integration capacity toward any OS. The product is really scalable and stable.

The tool has ample scalability. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten. Scalability can be improved, though.

During the rebuilding process, we faced problems with the nodes and opened a ticket with the vendor. The support person provided us with a solution within two to three hours. We had a good experience with them.

The product was handed over to us with pre-installed configurations. We just mounted our server in the rack and enabled the connectivity. The initial setup was quite easy to manage. We are using a private cloud to optimize our hospital management system. We have discussed with the vendor the solution's scalability from private to public cloud for our future needs. All the infrastructure was installed within 15 days.

The product is very expensive. It is the only reason my previous organization switched to a different product.

We have a FortiGate license. The product is very good. The technical support is also very good. If the solution provides a single console to manage everything, it would be more convenient and powerful for system administration. Overall, I rate the tool an eight and a half out of ten.

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.

In terms of the primary use case, I have a contract with Fortune 500. I was hired to go in and to maintain their test evaluation network, the test development network and managing components of that. This is a DevOps operation, where they develop software drivers. And so the network monitoring tools that are separately used there are IT-based. The testing devices that I had to monitor and manage, were a combination of Cisco, Extreme, Aruba, and Mellanox. It was all a test development environment developing software that they were going to monetize to be able to sell to distributors and people who have incorporated their product into network devices.

For the customers I work with it provides flexibility as far as storage is concerned, so it's security and access.

We use the HyperCloud for instant storage. It is all intellectual properties, so controls and constraints and the data that's associated with that, all of the "secret sauce" as they call it, is always kept on-prem, but some of the old documentation, rather than having it take up space locally they've pushed that to the cloud, they access it at will, using the hybrid cloud type of concept.

Everybody can get to it. You don't have to concern yourself to the remote again to the old school way. You had to log into the department, the company's network to be able to get to the data. Now because you're in the Cloud, technically you don't have to log into the company network, you can log directly into the Cloud from wherever you are.

It just makes it a lot easier instead of going in through the company network and then up to the Cloud, depending on what type of portal you've created that is web-based, you can log into that portal directly into the Cloud and come onto the prem on the backside of that if you wanted to.

The stability is a double-edged sword. There are a lot more legacy systems out there that cannot talk to the cloud, the on-prem, monolithic and proprietary. Then there are contemporary systems that have been upgraded that do not communicate between the two. That's the reason for the hybrid title is because it's not fully Cloud-based, it's got to be able to talk to the Prem. 

A lot of the software that is legacy based wasn't designed to be able to talk to the cloud in a way that the new contemporary software does, it makes it completely transparent. It's the next best thing to having two separate environments and having two separate logons to be able to access those environments. We have an integrated environment with some patches and some bells and whistles. It's got to be monitored a little bit more heavily than having two separate networks.

The scalability of the solution is a godsend. Depending on how it's set up is how successful it's going to be.

For example, VMware is the dominant on-prem virtualized operating system, they were the ones who created the whole virtual machine concept. Microsoft jumped on board with Hyper-V a couple of years after VMware established itself. VMware on-prem essentially is a cloud on the premise.

The cloud itself is strictly virtualized. As far as the efficacies of the cloud and the hybrid Cloud concept, VMware is the clear winner when it comes to virtualization. Microsoft is a clear winner when it comes to desktops.

Now VMware can talk to Microsoft Azure. It can talk to Google Cloud. It can talk to AWS. It can talk to Oracle. It has connectors, which is the hybrid cloud piece. They've developed connectors now for all of the multi-cloud environments.

Their customer support leaves a lot to be desired. The standards are not that great.

A good example is that Apple has its own proprietary operating system, even though the phone may be Android-based, but the iOS that runs on the operating system that runs on Apple is proprietary. At the end of the day, it comes down to testing.

Back in the '90s, there was the thing called straight-line testing and what it essentially would be is that a software developer would create an app pursuant to a set of specifications. There'd be manufacturer specifications and then the engineering spec. Then with that, you would create the application. It would be given to testers to test and see if it worked as described in the specification and then there would be integration testing or compatibility testing done with that application for any type of conflicts and to see if it breaks anything else that it would be installed against.

My point is that all of the apps that people have on their cell phones have all been designed at minimum to a common standard according to what Apple published. The problem is that a small software company can sit back and write an application at their desktop remotely and sitting in their house and an up and coming software developer doesn't have the deep pockets or the expertise to do quality testing against any of the applications that are going to be installed on the phone. He has no idea what you're going to put on the phone. Therefore any app you put on the phone has the potential of being affected by any apps that are installed on the phone. Or any app you put on the phone has the potential of affecting all of the apps once it's installed on the phone. This is the reason why phones have the problems they do. 

It's a computer, but you have to have a common ground for it to be able to inter-operate in the presence of all the other applications that are there. This is where the hybrid cloud and knowing about how all the different operating systems function out of the box is important. That's the only reference you have because that's the only consistency when you go into an environment that you didn't install yourself. That's what's missing as far as the support is concerned.

Agile software testing happens to all applications and they throw it over the wall before it's mature. They throw it over the wall, then there's a series of updates to come after that. It's not fully baked before they put it out to the public. Whatever the problems are, they know that they are trying to fix it in the next release, but they're not doing any regression testing against the product. 

It took longer to go to market doing waterfall because it was a thorough testing path. Because everybody's rushing to market to try and get their app out and make their money and stuff like this. 

Anybody can create anything, throw it out there, and say it's something and because it hasn't been thoroughly tested, you have no idea until you put it on the phone whether it's going to break it or not.

That's the problem with hybrid and providing technical support for hybrid environments is that there's no watermark established for how the product was six months.

The problem is that everybody is throwing it over the wall and they're letting the customer field test the product. 

The complexity of the set up is subjective. The initial setup is a matter of the end-user preference, and it's a matter of what the security protocols and what the policy is for a particular company. For example, if you're in Europe or outside the United States, you're subjected to data governance that falls under the GDPR regulations. It's a straightforward protocol for setting up and then providing access to end-users, making sure that whatever it is they access is on a need-to-know basis, least privilege as far as that's concerned. So it's site-specific and it's customer-specific as far as the complexity or the simplicity of it altogether. 

My advice to someone considering this solution is to take a pragmatic approach, there are set pieces in a hybrid cloud deployment and you have to do a proof of concept with. You have to go in and do an audit. You've got to create a statement of work. You've got to identify, who are the administrators or who's impacted by any downtime once you try to introduce this. You've got to be able to sandbox it. Duplicate the environment in a lab and then sandbox the improvements that you want to integrate and then you got to roll out a pilot and try it.

My biggest pet peeve about doing anything with clouds is that once you sign up for something on the cloud, you don't have any control over what they do with that information. Because of the convenience, nobody thinks about the consequence of putting that stuff out there and what they're going to do with it. Unless you're super technical, you have no concept of what's being done. All you know is that you are getting what you want and you really don't want to burden yourself with figuring out on what's being done.

If you knew what's being done, you wouldn't do it. 

What people don't know, is that IPV6 is the back door. This is where the security issue comes in. IPV6 is the back door for Microsoft all of the network operating. You have to go in and turn it off manually. 

You have to understand those things too. It's second nature for people who work on the environment, but we have to be aware of that because when you're troubleshooting in a hybrid environment, you have to rely on whether it's the existing documentation; you have to rely on your working knowledge about how things connect and what have you, and then you have to try and figure out what's been done. You also have to identify what's on and what's not on; and who's talking and where.

So the hybrid cloud adds a layer of complexity as opposed to having two separate environments to log into; the on-premise environment in the cloud environment.

If you're separate, it makes it a lot easier. But when you're integrated, you're bringing in a whole can of worms at that point.

The next feature I would like to have full disclosure of what's being done with the data.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. But it's a catch 22. It requires a thorough understanding of what the limitations are and what the consequences of utilizing the system itself or trying to accept those limitations.