By
Publication Date: 2026-01-28 09:04:00
Grant Friend, Manager, EMEA Portfolio Solutions at Nutanix.
Most organisations believe they have a cloud problem, but I believe the real problem is cloud management. Infrastructure did not suddenly become more complex because businesses adopted hybrid or multicloud strategies. Complexity crept in because environments changed faster than the tools used to run them. Over time, platforms were added, workloads spread and responsibility fragmented, while the promise of a single pane to manage it all quietly gave way to a collection of disconnected views.
What is striking is that most organisations did not lose control of their infrastructure after adopting a hybrid or multicloud approach. They lost control because their cloud management approaches never moved beyond offering partial, platform-specific panes onto an increasingly interconnected reality.
When visibility doesn’t translate into control
Most cloud management platforms offer visibility through dashboards, metrics, alerts and colourful charts that show what is happening across environments. That information is useful, but only up to a point.
What operations teams quickly discover is that visibility without context creates noise. Alerts arrive from multiple systems, each telling part of the story, while the harder question is not “what is happening?”, but “what do I do about it, and how quickly?”
This is where the idea of the “single pane of glass” starts to fall apart. In many cases, it simply means a unified…
