A bright data centre aisle with rows of cabinets receding into the distance and nobody present, showing the scale a fleet has to be operated at

Product · Estate operations

One operator, one control plane, every Maximo environment you run.

Cloud Manager registers every IBM Maximo and MAS environment as an object carrying its tenant, purpose, cloud, state, owner and access list. Routine actions are defined once and issued against a group, whether that group is two environments or twenty.

The teardown

Where a fleet operations week goes

Fourteen environments across three tenants and two clouds, operated by one person on shift. Every line below is work performed once per environment.

Share of one operator week on that fleet

  • Routine actions, performed once per environment

    34%

    Decided today by: Whoever picked the ticket up

  • Standing environments up and down for test and training cycles

    22%

    Decided today by: The programme that asked for one

  • Access, credentials and secrets, held differently per cloud

    18%

    Decided today by: Whoever already holds the access

  • Reconciling the environment list against what actually runs

    14%

    Decided today by: Nobody in particular

  • Accounting on Monday for what happened over the weekend

    12%

    Decided today by: The operator writing it up

None of this is a defect in IBM Maximo or MAS. It is what a fleet costs when each environment is reached by hand, through a different access path per cloud.

Control plane behind every Maximo estate MaxIron hosts and operates, across clouds and sectors, every customer environment is registered in it, which is why Sentinel and Autoheal know what they are looking at.

The operator view

What one operator does without raising a ticket

Actions run against the register, and each environment reports its own result. Cloud Manager complements IBM Maximo and MAS by operating the environments they run in.

  1. 01

    Register an environment

    Tenant, purpose, cloud, state, owner and access list recorded once. Operations run from that register.

  2. 02

    Act on a group rather than an environment

    Stop, start, refresh, scale or rotate a secret, defined once and issued against eleven environments across two clouds in a single action.

  3. 03

    Read the exceptions first

    Every environment reports its own result. The one that would not stop cleanly is named, with what it said, before a tester signs in on Monday.

  4. 04

    Provision a MAS environment from the tenant record

    Cluster, database, integrations and access arrive configured together, against the tenant the request names.

  5. 05

    Act as themselves

    Credentials sit against the environment rather than with a person. The operator acts with their own role permissions, and the action is attributed to them.

Three figures, each with its basis

What the register is worth in numbers

14
Environments held by one operator on shift

The fleet shape used throughout this page: three tenants, two clouds, fourteen registered environments.

40 min
Approved request to a reachable MAS environment

Elapsed build time on MaxIron-managed estates, measured from approval. Network and firewall approvals sit with the customer and fall outside the figure.

1
Action definition per fleet operation, whatever the cloud

Cloud differences are held in the environment record, so the action is written once and applied to a group.

The finding

Operating a fleet stops scaling with the number of environments in it.

The fifteenth environment adds a row to the register. It does not add a runbook, an access path or a Friday evening on the rota.

The 22% line item, costed out

Non-production, stopped for a weekend

Eleven environments, three tenants, two clouds. On a spread estate this is the action that quietly stops being attempted.

Time

Reached by hand

Issued once from the register

18:40 Fri

Whoever is free reaches the environments that are easy to reach. The awkward ones stay running.

One scheduled action against eleven non-production environments in three tenants and two clouds.

18:52 Fri

Nothing is written down, so which environments went down is a question for Monday.

Ten report down. One reports a database that would not stop cleanly, left running and logged as an exception with its reason.

06:00 Mon

A tester finds an environment down and raises a ticket, unsure whether that was deliberate.

The operator reads one exception, by name, with its reason, before anyone signs in.

06:40 Mon

Two engineers restore environments in whatever order looks right.

The group returns in dependency order, database before application. Ten need no intervention.

09:00 Mon

Somebody notices that one environment ran all weekend.

One account of the weekend: what stopped, what returned on its own, what needed a person.

Two ledgers

The cloud account and the Maximo environment are counted separately

Cloud Manager sits above provider tooling, at environment level.

Owned by your cloud or platform team

Provider consoles, Terraform and the account itself hold contracts, commitments, regions, quotas and capacity. Infrastructure work stays there, in tooling that team already knows.

Unit of work
A resource
Decides
Regions, commitments, capacity
Stops at
The resource

Operated through Cloud Manager

Each IBM Maximo and MAS environment is registered as an object carrying its tenant, purpose, cloud, state, owner and access list. Actions are defined once and applied to a group of them.

Unit of work
A named environment
Decides
State, schedule, access
Stops at
The environment

Scope and boundaries

Where the Cloud Manager remit ends

Three limits to settle before an environment is registered.

It operates only what it can reach

An environment needs an access path and credentials holding the permissions each action requires. Anything behind a path we cannot be granted stays outside the fleet rather than half managed.

It decides nothing about what you buy

Contracts, commitments, regions and capacity stay with your cloud team, and so does the decision about how large production needs to be.

It complements cloud provider tooling

Infrastructure-level work stays in provider consoles and Terraform. Cloud Manager is the control plane behind MaxIron managed hosting and the layer Sentinel, Autoheal and Change Control read the estate from.

MaxIron Cloud Manager, frequently asked questions

Which clouds does Cloud Manager operate?
Public cloud, private cloud and on-premises Maximo estates, including mixed fleets. Cloud differences sit in the environment record, so an action is written once.
Does it replace our cloud team?
No. Contracts, capacity and infrastructure work stay with them. What changes is that one operator holds the fourteen environment fleet described on this page.
Is it available without MaxIron managed hosting?
Yes. It is the control plane behind MaxIron managed hosting, and it is deployed for customers who operate their own Maximo estates.
How does it handle multi-tenant MAS?
The tenant is a first-class object. A MAS environment is registered against its tenant, and an action can be scoped to one tenant or across several.
What happens to an environment that ignores a fleet action?
It is reported by name with what it said. Results are recorded per environment rather than as one pass or fail, and nothing is forced. The entries that need a person are what an operator reads first.
How much access does it need to our cloud accounts?
Only the permissions the registered environments and the agreed actions require, scoped environment by environment before registration.

Bring the list of everything you run.

One session on your own fleet: we put your line items against the teardown above and register a representative slice of your estate.

Bring this to the first call

  • The current environment list, however out of date
  • The clouds and accounts in scope, and who holds access to each
  • The routine action performed most often, and roughly what it costs in time
  • One environment nobody can currently account for