IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management wins a 2020 Cloud Award
By: Arin Bhowmick
Tags: UX, Cloud Computing, UX Design, UI, Design

We’re so excited to announce that our team at IBM Cloud has won a 2020 Cloud Award for the IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management experience design, in the Hybrid Cloud Solution category. This is such an incredible achievement for the team for this truly ground breaking product.

The Cloud Awards program celebrates the brightest and the best in Cloud Computing. Open to organizations across the globe, the Cloud Awards recognized outstanding products across different categories in cloud computing. The number of applications was overwhelming this year, and we are so proud to have excelled in this competition.

What is IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management?

IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management, running on Red Hat OpenShift, is a software solution offering that enables clients to streamline their business operations, workloads and clusters across multiple cloud environments. Within a single view, users are provided with abilities for increased transparency, consistent governance, and application automation across all of their cloud infrastructures.

The governance and risk dashboard provides customers with a seamless way to observe and manage security standards across clusters and clouds.

The software solution integrates with commonly used tools and applications that users may already have in place for their business operations so that they don’t have to interrupt too much of their workflow as they transition their applications to the cloud. IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management includes application performance monitoring and root cause analysis, virtualized infrastructure autoscaling, and consistent security and governance policies. These features help businesses keep their applications and operations running smoothly without spending a lot of time and resources on maintenance.

Today’s users who are trying to modernize their applications and business operations for the cloud are facing many options for cloud tools, environments, and platforms. Users often resort to managing their applications across disparate tools and environments, spending more time and money on their business operations. IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management provides an integrated environment for users to manage all of their cloud applications.

The application view allows a user to dive deep into the details of an application, including a topology view that shows how clusters and resources are connected within apps.

Designing a Cloud Management Solution

The team behind IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management designed this software platform around their users’ needs and pain points. It was a challenge to make sure that users with drastically different roles and responsibilities could experience value in the same product. The design team had to work with a variety of user personas and understand what they needed from a software offering. The target users included Administrators looking at clusters, Site Reliability Engineers working with applications, and Security Operators looking to get visibility into application policies. The team worked to create a series of intuitive user interfaces that seamlessly brought all of these capabilities into a cohesive experience.

For example, Security Operators often struggle to have an understanding of the status of all of their applications and communicate any changes with their teams, and typically have to look across multiple locations to get all of this information. The design team created a streamlined dashboard view of applications’ security policies to help Security Operators stay on top of their workloads and better communicate with their teams.

To achieve a cohesive user experience, designers worked closely with customers, developers and offering management teams to build subject matter expertise in the workflows related to infrastructure, application and security management. The design team also worked closely with their users, listening to and incorporating their feedback. The team’s understanding of an integrated platform evolved as they learned more about what their users’ need was. They were able to create a platform that addressed pain points at many stages of the user journey. This cross-collaborative effort resulted in an intuitive user experience that leveraged all the new benefits this product could deliver.

Congrats to the entire IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management product team for their efforts in creating an incredible experience for our clients.