For all its benefits, the cloud has ushered in an era of unprecedented IT scale and complexity.

Modern IT environments are pulling data from so many sources and product lines that they often become unruly. What's needed is a new generation of smart software to manage those heterogeneous resources, Joe Kinsella, founder and CTO of CloudHealth Technologies, a Boston-based cloud management platform developer, told IT Best of Breed.

"(In) every quarter in the public cloud world, complexity is getting harder," said Kinsella. "If you plot the ability of software to contain that complexity, you can see the gap that's been growing over time."

That expanding "complexity gap" explains why the ability to establish comprehensive management policies and automate actions is becoming an essential component of successful cloud deployments.

"The only way you're going to be able to make cloud management successful in the long term, because the pace of change is so fast, is with smart software," Kinsella said.

Such software needs a view not just of the cloud provider, but into operating systems, configuration managers, log managers, application managers and the like.

Several years ago, the introduction of hypervisors ramped up the complexity of managing infrastructure. With the advent of the cloud, the complexity gap widened further, Kinsella said.

Seeing software struggle to keep up, and recognizing the challenge of implementing comprehensive policy controls in the cloud, Kinsella was motivated to found CloudHealth in 2012.

"It was clear for me that the only way cloud would be successful long term was (to shift to a point) where smart software manages policy," he said.