Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs)

As enterprises expand their cloud footprints across multiple providers and deploy more workloads, the need for centralized control, governance, and cost optimization has never been more pressing. Cloud management platforms (CMPs) are the solution to this problem, providing a single pane of glass to monitor, manage, and optimize cloud resources across various environments.

But while CMPs were once the gold standard for enterprise cloud management, the rapidly changing cloud landscape has exposed significant limitations in their approach.

Let’s take a look at what CMPs are, what they do, why they’re no longer meeting enterprise needs, and how recent approaches are filling the gaps to provide cloud management that’s more agile and developer-friendly.

What are cloud management platforms?

CMPs are integrated products that provide monitoring, management, and optimization across multiple cloud environments. They emerged as enterprises began to adopt multicloud strategies that required centralized tools to maintain control and visibility across a fragmented infrastructure.

In their traditional form, CMPs aim to provide comprehensive management of cloud resources through a single interface. They connect to cloud providers’ APIs to monitor resources, apply governance policies, track costs, and enable standardized provisioning processes.

The primary goal of CMPs has always been to reduce complexity and give IT operations teams a way to manage hybrid and multicloud environments without having to switch between multiple provider consoles and tools. This centralization was supposed to simplify governance, improve operational efficiency, and cut costs.

Key functions of traditional CMPs

Here are the main features CMPs have been able to provide users:

Provisioning and orchestration

Traditional CMPs provide centralized provisioning capabilities, allowing teams to deploy standardized resources across different cloud environments. They typically offer templating systems, service catalogs, and workflow automation to simplify the creation of cloud resources.

This provisioning layer is meant to ensure consistency and reduce manual effort in deploying workloads.

Cost monitoring and control

One of the most valuable functions of CMPs is their ability to track cloud spend across providers and implement cost control. They typically offer dashboards showing current and historical spend, allocation of spend to departments or projects, and identification of unused or oversized resources. This helps with cloud cost management, a big issue as cloud usage grows.

Governance and compliance

CMPs provide policy enforcement mechanisms to ensure cloud resources comply with security, regulatory, and organizational standards. They typically have features such as role-based access control, policy templates, and compliance reporting.

These governance capabilities allow enterprises to have control over cloud environments while allowing teams to provision resources within approved guardrails. For regulated industries, this is especially critical for compliance across distributed cloud infrastructure.

Lifecycle management

Traditional CMPs have capabilities to help users track and control cloud resources throughout their entire lifecycle. A CMP will typically have monitoring, patching, backup, and resource termination features.

These lifecycle management features aim to keep cloud resources properly maintained, secure, and cost-efficient throughout their life. When done right, they can reduce the operational burden on IT teams.

Challenges with traditional CMPs

Despite the promise, traditional CMPs have struggled lately as cloud-native options have continued to mature and modern DevOps practices grow. As more agile approaches to application delivery are adopted, the limitations of CMPs are becoming more apparent.

Limited support for modern, agile workflows

Traditional CMPs were designed for IT-centric operations, not developer workflows. They typically enforce processes that conflict with the speed and flexibility developers need in today’s competitive landscape. While development teams have adopted infrastructure as code (IaC) for its agility and integration with CI/CD pipelines, many CMPs still have separate, isolated workflows that create friction.

Complexity in setup and maintenance

Getting a CMP set up and keeping up with its ongoing maintenance requires significant expertise and effort. Many CMPs require extensive integration work to connect with existing systems, cloud providers, and tools. This complexity means long implementation times and high costs.

Poor developer experience

CMPs can have clunky user interfaces and workflows that put control over usability. Developers used to code-based approaches find themselves filling in forms, approval workflows, and waiting, which slows them down.

This poor developer experience is a major barrier to adoption and often leads to “shadow IT” as teams try to work around the official tools, usually at the expense of governance and cost control.

Lack of flexibility in hybrid/multicloud setups

While CMPs promise to manage hybrid and multicloud environments, many can’t deliver consistent experiences across different providers. They typically provide deeper integration with some clouds and basic functionality for others, creating an uneven management experience.

Vendor lock-in

Traditional CMPs create a form of vendor lock-in, making it difficult to change management platforms once you’ve invested in one. Many require proprietary approaches to resource definition and management that don’t translate to other tools or direct cloud provider interfaces. This lock-in limits your strategic options and creates dependency on vendors.

How cloud management needs are evolving

The limitations of traditional CMPs are becoming more apparent as cloud management needs continue to evolve. Several key trends are changing what users need from their cloud management solutions:

DevOps, IaC, CI/CD, and self-service trends

Modern development practices are all about automation, self-service, and code-based infrastructure management. DevOps teams are using IaC tools like Terraform and Ansible, integrated into CI/CD pipelines, to manage cloud resources.

These approaches enable faster, more consistent, and version-controlled infrastructure changes. Traditional CMPs that don’t integrate with these workflows create bottlenecks that slow down development velocity and frustrate engineering teams.

Multicloud complexity

The complexity of managing multiple cloud environments is growing. This demands management solutions that can provide consistent experiences across providers while respecting the unique capabilities and constraints of each. Managing multiple clouds requires tools that are flexible enough to adapt to different provider models without forcing a lowest-common-denominator approach.

The need for scalable, flexible environments

Modern applications require dynamic, scalable environments that can adapt to changing demands. Development teams need to be able to spin up ephemeral environments for testing, demo, and deployment without going through lengthy provisioning processes. This clashes with the control-centric approach of many traditional CMPs, so there’s a tension between development velocity and operational control.

How do you get the balance right?

A new alternative to CMPs

Traditional CMPs were built for a different era of cloud computing, one with fewer environments, simpler deployments, and more predictable scaling. Today’s reality demands something different. Your developers require self-service capabilities that don’t sacrifice governance. Your operations team requires visibility without complexity. And your finance department? They need predictable cloud costs, not just reports showing where the money went.

Platforms  environment-centric approach are addressing these challenges head on. By focusing on complete application environments rather than individual cloud resources, platforms such as Quali Torque provide the control you need without sacrificing the speed and flexibility your teams demand. The Environment-as-a-Service model fundamentally changes how your teams interacts with cloud resources, empowering developers while maintaining the guardrails that keep costs and compliance in check.

What is Quali Torque?

Quali Torque makes it possible to accelerate and optimize your entire cloud infrastructure. Unlike traditional CMPs that focus on managing individual resources, Torque takes an environment-centric approach, managing complete application environments through Day 2 of the infrastructure lifecycle.

Torque vs. Traditional CMPs: Direct comparison

Key differentiators that win over CMP users

Environments as a service

Traditional CMPs have you juggling individual cloud resources. Modern CMPs flip the script by focusing on complete environments instead. It leverages your existing Infrastructure as Code assets (Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, Kubernetes) to create ready-to-run environment blueprints that can be deployed repeatedly. This environment-centric approach means you can:

• Define complex multi-cloud environments as code
• Deploy these environments consistently and repeatedly
• Maintain configurations at scale without redundant orchestration processes
• Automate the entire environment lifecycle, not just individual resources

Developer self-service

Let’s face it, your developers are tired of waiting for infrastructure. With an alternative solution, they don’t have to. The platform creates a simplified, governed self-service experience where developers can provision pre-approved environments with a single click.

This approach empowers your developers to move faster while ensuring operations teams maintain control through pre-approved environment blueprints. There will be no more bottlenecks or shadow IT; only productive developers will operate within regulated boundaries.

Cloud cost governance baked in

Traditional CMPs might show you cloud costs after they’ve already spiraled out of control. Newer platforms take a fundamentally different approach by embedding cost governance directly into your workflows. The platform helps you:

• Find wasteful cloud resources and calculate the savings possible without
• Enforce policies to prevent oversized resources before deployment
• Automate resource scheduling to power off environments after hours
• Tag resources for accurate cost allocation

AI automation and intelligence

This AI-first approach lowers the barrier to entry so more engineers can design environments regardless of IaC expertise. While traditional CMPs like Morpheus require your most skilled engineers to script everything (creating bottlenecks), Emerging tools such as the AI Copilot make infrastructure creation and optimization accessible to everyone. Your whole team can be more productive, not just your cloud experts.

The platform helps you:

• Automate discovery and import of your existing IaC modules, config resources, and other assets from Git repos.
• Use AI to generate environment blueprints from simple natural language prompts.
• Generate AI-powered policy based on Open Policy Agent standards, governance for teams of all skill levels.
• Detect idle resources with auto-recommendations to terminate.

Check out our detailed comparison in Comparing Morpheus Data Alternatives and discover the trend towards environment-centric platforms.

Accelerating cloud value with modern management

Is your traditional CMP delivering the value you need in today’s fast-paced cloud landscape? The signs are clear: rigid workflows, complex setups, frustrated developers, and those surprising cloud bills at the end of the month are all telling you it’s time for a change.

Unlike traditional CMPs that force you to adapt to their way of working, modern environment-centric platforms adapt to your needs, integrating with your existing tools and processes while adding the value of environment-centric management.