Cloud management refers to the administration and oversight of cloud computing products and services.

Public clouds are managed by cloud service providers, which operate the underlying infrastructure such as servers, storage, networking, and data center facilities. Users may also opt to manage their public cloud services with a third-party cloud management tool.

Users of public cloud services can generally select from three basic cloud provisioning categories:

Managing a private cloud requires software tools to help create a virtualized pool of compute resources, provide a self-service portal for end users and handle security, resource allocation, tracking and billing. Management tools for private clouds tend to be service driven, as opposed to resource driven, because cloud environments are typically highly virtualized and organized in terms of portable workloads.

In hybrid cloud environments, compute, network and storage resources must be managed across multiple domains, so a good management strategy should start by defining what needs to be managed, and where and how to do it. Policies to help govern these domains should include configuration and installation of images, access control, and budgeting and reporting. Access control often includes the use of Single sign-on (SSO), in which a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.

Cloud management combines software and technologies in a design for managing cloud environments. Software developers have responded to the management challenges of cloud computing with a variety of cloud management platforms and tools. These tools include native tools offered by public cloud providers as well as third-party tools designed to provide consistent functionality across multiple cloud providers. Administrators must balance the competing requirements of efficient consistency across different cloud platforms with access to different native functionality within individual cloud platforms. The growing acceptance of public cloud and increased multicloud usage is driving the need for consistent cross-platform management. Rapid adoption of cloud services is introducing a new set of management challenges for those technical professionals responsible for managing IT systems and services.

Cloud-management platforms and tools should have the ability to provide minimum functionality in the following categories. Functionality can be both natively provided or orchestrated via third-party integration.

Organizations may group these criteria into key use cases including Cloud Brokerage, DevOps Automation, Governance, and Day-2 Life Cycle Operations.