Vendor-agnostic cloud cost monitoring and optimization (CCMO) tools can simplify monitoring across public and private clouds.
Cloud migration offers numerous benefits, including flexibility, scalability, and cost optimization. Businesses can shift from fixed-cost IT infrastructure management to more agile, secure, and scalable operations. The movement to the cloud is gathering serious momentum, with Gartner predicting that global public cloud spending will rise by around 20.7% to reach $591.8 billion in 2023. But management, and especially cost management, can be challenging. Cloud cost monitoring and optimization (CCMO) can help.
Why? Today, it’s common for enterprises to utilize multiple cloud vendors, either by design or due to mergers or acquisitions. A 451 Research report states that 98% of enterprises already use or plan to use at least two cloud infrastructure providers, with 31% employing four or more services. This trend has valid reasons, such as selecting specific features from different providers or avoiding dependence on a single vendor by running applications on various clouds. Additionally, multiple providers ensure business continuity in case of issues or disruptions.
However, migrating operations to multi-cloud environments presents several challenges alongside the benefits:
Visibility Challenges
Organizations lack visibility across multi-cloud operations, resources, readiness, and health. Different cloud providers have unique requirements, architectures, interfaces, and monitoring options. Free basic monitoring tools are insufficient, and robust vendor monitoring services are costly, especially with multiple vendors. Interoperability issues between cloud vendors limit visibility, creating blind spots that can hamper effective threat detection and response. What’s more, IT departments lack the budget, time, and resources to become experts for each provider.
Cloud Sprawl and Cost Control
Cloud sprawl, the uncontrolled growth of cloud usage, leads to software bloat, unused storage, and obsolete virtual systems. Even cloud-native enterprises struggle with this issue, and organizations without end-to-end visibility may end up paying for resources they don’t need or use. Multi-cloud operations exacerbate sprawl, resulting in unnecessary expenses. Enterprises need a comprehensive method to manage cloud processes and expenses, identifying and eliminating charges for unused services.
See also: Over $100 Billion Wasted On Cloud Migration Overruns
Incident Resolution and Risk Mitigation
Limited visibility and cloud sprawl expose enterprises to increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks. The complexity of managing multiple cloud services, on-premises systems, and private clouds manually contributes to security problems. Effective incident response requires either vendor-specific security solutions or an in-house resolution protocol. Both options require real-time monitoring, incident data analysis, and coordination with system managers. A comprehensive multi-cloud strategy with vendor-agnostic tools is crucial to prevent attacks and avoid additional costs for specific security solutions.
Introducing Vendor-Agnostic CCMOs
A clear cloud strategy is vital for successful cloud migration and management. Without guidance, enterprises may face technology silos, non-standardized implementations, cloud sprawl, higher costs, and increased risk exposure. Effective cloud management requires comprehensive observation of operations. Vendor-agnostic cloud cost monitoring and optimization (CCMO) tools simplify monitoring across public and private clouds. Powered by AI and machine learning, these tools offer multiple benefits and a competitive advantage for cloud transition. Here are some of the important ways in which a vendor-agnostic CCMO tool can support an enterprise’s cloud management strategy:
End-to-End Visibility
A vendor-agnostic CCMO tool provides complete visibility of all cloud assets, regardless of vendor, location, technology, application, or platform. It reduces complexity and sprawl by collecting data from various cloud resources and mapping the infrastructure in real time. A centralized monitoring console offers a holistic view of cloud operations, enabling real-time transparency and observability to deliver intelligent insights and granular data analysis to understand usage and distribution across regions, service providers, or business units. This intelligence drives cloud optimization, improves cost visibility, and helps identify and address cloud sprawl and unnecessary elements before they become widespread.
Autonomous Cloud Life-cycle Operations
An agnostic CCMO tool enables efficient management and optimization of complex cloud environments. Automation tools handle routine tasks, such as user management, health checks, event management, and compliance. This reduces resource burden and minimizes disruptions during upgrades and patching. The centralized monitoring provided by the CCMO tool enables proactive system health checks and automated IT event management. Continuous monitoring assesses system readiness and health, identifies alerts, and autonomously resolves incidents through a closed-loop approach. If incidents cannot be resolved autonomously, they are escalated for remediation. This reduces downtime and mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR).
Improved Financial Management
An agnostic CCMO tool offers enhanced observational capabilities to track cloud expenditure and conduct a comprehensive cost analysis. It compares spending with value realized, follows spend-tracking protocols, and benchmarks performance. Anomaly detection identifies patterns, trends, outliers, and root causes, alerting enterprise cloud teams to potential issues. With visibility of costs and usage, the tool provides right-sizing recommendations for asset optimization and cost savings. It helps identify revenue leakage, forecast cloud costs accurately, and plan budgets. Ultimately, it accelerates business value realization from cloud deployments.
Enhanced Governance with Asset Tagging
Enterprises utilize tags to identify cloud resources, offering usage and cost insights. Improper tagging can lead to inflated bills and inefficient resource utilization. An agnostic CCMO tool improves the tagging mechanism by identifying untagged resources and facilitating tag policies across all vendors, units, technologies, and applications. Tag-based access management detects cloud sprawl by evaluating mandatory tags like business unit, application, and environment. This enhances resource understanding, boosts security and compliance, and restricts access to authorized users only.
While there are numerous challenges to migrating to the cloud in a strategic way in this era of cloud-driven commerce, adding a robust vendor-agnostic CCMO tool at the heart of a cloud management strategy can be a literal game changer. Having an independent and dedicated resource that measures utility, effectively tracks assets, automates tasks, detects anomalies, and optimizes costs in real-time enables enterprises to position themselves for competitive success.
