Cloud operations startup Emma Technologies S.a.r.l. took the wraps off a new feature called Brownfield Onboarding today, aiming to solve the most persistent infrastructure governance headaches faced by enterprises today.

Announced at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe today, Brownfield Onboarding enables information technology teams to bring their existing VMware environments, public cloud instances and Kubernetes clusters under a single umbrella that provides consistent governance across them all.

Emma is tackling a problem that’s common to most enterprises. Though modern cloud infrastructure management tools excel when it comes to “greenfield” deployments – those shiny new projects started from scratch – they’re ineffective with the essential “brownfield” projects that have existed for years.

Most larger enterprises have to deal with a patchwork of IT environments. They include legacy VMware servers, departmental Amazon Web Services accounts and Azure instances that were acquired through mergers, plus the new specialized AI “neoclouds” that have become all the rage.

The challenge of bringing all of these brownfield environments into a unified management plane is immense, because everything has to be rebuilt from scratch, which requires enormous resources. As a result, many enterprises choose to ignore governance, resulting in fragmented visibility over their sprawling infrastructure estates.

But not anymore, at least not if Emma gets its way. It says Brownfield Onboarding will make it simple for IT teams to plug into their existing environments without disrupting the workloads they support, the company said. Rather than forcing migrations, emma wraps its governance layer around whatever accounts are in place.

Founder and Chief Executive Dmitry Panenkov (pictured) said most governance solutions only cover the infrastructure they provision, ignoring what’s already in place. “Brownfield Onboarding is our answer to that,” he said. “[It provides] full governance over the existing estate, without disrupting a single workload.”

According to Panenkov, emma takes a cautious approach, using an “audit-first” workflow that inventories the entire estate, rather than just blindly sucking in every resource and potentially breaking legacy applications. With this inventory, IT teams can then import specific resources into their governance umbrella, ensuring that no configurations are accidentally changed.

Once the existing assets are onboarded, they can be treated the same as new greenfield deployments. That means teams benefit from a unified view of security compliance, spending and performance, spanning AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and on-premises environments.

Smuget Consulting analyst Rob Strechay told SiliconANGLE it’s critical for enterprises to bring their disparate systems of record together if they’re going to leverage agentic artificial intelligence. Organizations must be able to govern their AI agents, wherever they’re working, he said. “The glue is the network between them, which must be enabled by an operational platform that provides security and respects sovereignty,” Strechay added. “Brownfield on-premises and in the cloud are among the most complex, thankless and difficult activities for platform engineers today, and Emma aims to solve that.”

Emma said it has already attracted the attention of global systems integrators such as PwC US Group LLP, which is using Brownfield Onboarding as a foundational piece for client’s AI and multicloud transformation projects.

The Brownfield Onboarding tool is available today, with support for VMware, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud environments, plus a number of regional AI cloud providers.

Photo: SiliconANGLE