(EOL) Cisco CloudCenter vs. OpsCompass

It is well suited for large corporate entities, whether they are in manufacturing, sales, engineering, healthcare, supply or shipping. It is easy to understand and operate once it has been initially configured. Expansion of the system is likewise easy to do once expertise has been acquired. The only difficulty with this or any cloud scenario is ensuring where the data is located and managing that securely.

Incentivized

We previously had separate products to manage Azure and AWS, each with different capabilities, and it was very complex for our team to go back and forth and try to make sense of each environment. OpsCompass is very well suited to give you a single view of our entire cloud environment. OpsCompass also brings excellent compliance policies. We were not highly skilled with these policies, but the product made it easy to perform an assessment of our current state and identify areas where we had non-compliance issues. CIS policies were a great area to start and we later tried the Microsoft 365 policies, which were also helpful. More policies would be great to see.

• We are able to automate deployment which has been a strength to the geographical distribution of the enterprise.
• We have been able to work with a wider variety of developer tools and haven't had to customize to fit CloudCenter.
• It is easier for us to allocate space and allow users to take advantage of the system directly with a minimum of overhead.

Incentivized

• Quick inventory of all my cloud resources
• Detects changes to my cloud resources--including the source of the changes (user or system)
• Cost impacts of changes to my cloud infrastructure

• The software and systems don't present a problem to us but the continued interaction with mid-level support teams and vendors can slow down implementation or correction of difficulties we experience.
• The continued overhead associated with peripheral training on systems we have purchased can cause delays.
• Language barriers sometimes show up but this, again, is due to remote middle agents that are themselves contractors of or sales agents of the main agency. It slows down communication and can introduce business difficulties.

Incentivized

• I would like to see more integrations to help surface alerts. Slack would be great, as an example.
• An imbedded tour or onboarding would help our new users, but overall, the product is pretty easy to figure out

We found that the cost advantages were greater by going with Cisco because of our present contracts and the materials and equipment we already had on hand. The reliability of the system, for us, outweighed any cost advantages we might have been realized by going with another provider. Certainly the service and support for the entire system is much better when handled by a single vendor with a good track record.

Incentivized

In this price range, we didn't find any other tools that provide this degree of cloud resource visibility. It's been an efficiency game-changer. I hope we'll see new modules as they expand their features to include active resource management policies. They've done such a good job of anticipating the needs of our CloudOps team, I plan to evaluate those new features (if/when they arrive).

• We have had a positive return on investment by adopting Cisco CloudCenter as the system is more mature than competitors. We have saved a lot by working with them rather than continuing to act as a defacto test location for other systems.
• We have been able to reduce the number of staff necessary to operate the system and turn them over to more profitable work.
• One negative impact we have seen is that it is difficult to map where the data is located at any specific instance.

Incentivized

• Our team was able to do roughly 30% more with the product. The automation helps us spot issues without a lot of manual work
• We identified changes that would have had a massive cost impact--spinning up or forgetting about infrastructure we didn't need.
• OpsCompass prevents configuration drift and maintains a healthy state across multi-clouds.