Why Multi-Cloud Management Platforms Need Standards: Key Insights & Evaluation

Background

With multi‑cloud becoming the new norm, building a Multi‑Cloud Management Platform (MCMP) has become a key focus for enterprises, yet China’s market is still in its early stage and lacks unified standards.

Market Data

In 2017 the Chinese government‑cloud market was about CNY 170.8 billion, growing at a 20 % compound annual rate, with 131 government cloud tender projects recorded in 2016‑2017.

Challenges of Multi‑Cloud

Enterprises now operate private, public and hybrid clouds, and many use services from multiple vendors. This creates difficulties such as migrating applications across heterogeneous environments, deploying across clouds, cross‑cloud networking, disaster recovery, and heavy manual workload.

Need for Management Tools

To simplify deployment and operation, powerful and easy‑to‑use multi‑cloud management tools are essential.

Industry Research

CCW Research reported that the Chinese cloud‑management‑platform market reached CNY 9.7 billion in 2016, a 36.6 % year‑over‑year increase, indicating a rapid growth phase with innovative vendors emerging.

First Domestic Evaluation Standard

TrustCloud has introduced China’s first evaluation standard for MCMPs, focusing on the product itself rather than the service provider. The standard assesses three dimensions:

Information authenticity disclosure : verification of enterprise and platform basic information through material review.

Platform quality : ability to meet basic capability requirements, covering integration of multiple infrastructures, cross‑platform orchestration, service‑catalog management, multi‑tenant/resource access control, and open APIs. The evaluation includes seven major areas—multi‑cloud access, heterogeneous resource management, resource management, service orchestration, operation monitoring, metering & billing, and security management—comprising 26 test items.

Service indicator completeness and compliance : assessment of service agreements for product lifecycle, operation services, and rights protection.

Participating Vendors

Five well‑known vendors—FIT2CLOUD, Yunji Technology, Yunxing Data, ZTE, and Boyun—have registered for the first round of evaluation.

Evaluation Timeline

The assessment is underway and results will be announced at the “2018 Cloud Computing Open‑Source Industry Conference” on March 21‑22, 2018.

Impact

Standardized evaluation is expected to regulate the domestic MCMP market, increase user confidence, protect legitimate cloud service providers, and promote healthy market development.