The One Thing You Need More than Cloud Visibility

If you ask a group of CIOs or analysts for a list of priorities for companies adopting cloud infrastructure, there’s no doubt that cloud visibility would be named near the top. Insight is important for everything from security to cost management. But cloud visibility on its own is not enough, particularly as widespread cloud usage continues to mature.

Don’t Get Us Wrong: Cloud Visibility is Important

Cloud visibility is a broad term, encompassing resource consumption and spend, security and regulatory compliance, and monitoring. In fact, cloud “monitoring” is a term that typically encompasses performance monitoring and security. This is certainly important: some projections show the cloud monitoring marketing reaching $3.9 billion in 2026, so there is obviously demand for these tools.

Another aspect is cost. Cloud cost visibility is a hot topic right now, and with good reason. Public cloud providers’ bills are confusing, and you need to be able to understand what you’re being charged for. It’s also important to see where your spend is going, ideally with slice-and-dice reporting so you can analyze by user, team, project, and resource type, and ensure internal chargeback based on consumption.

However, in terms of resource and cost management, cloud visibility alone is not enough to make a change.

Cloud Visibility is Useless without Action

There’s a reason that this time of year, self-help gurus encourage resolution makers to make their goals actionable. Aspirations are great. Knowledge is great. But without practical application, aspirations and knowledge won’t lead to change.

When it comes to cloud cost management, there are several capabilities that you need in order to capitalize on the insights gained through visibility. Three important ones to keep in mind are:

1. The ability to allocate costs to teams.
2. The ability to automate remediation.
3. The ability to optimize spending.

The popular cloud cost management tools tend to be strong on some combination of analytics, reporting dashboards, chargeback/showback, budget allocation, governance, and recommendations (which can get quite granular in areas such as reserved instances and orphaned resources). However, they require external tools or people to act upon these recommendations and lack automation.

Actionable is Good. Optimization is Better.

As you research cloud visibility and monitoring solutions to address knowledge gaps in your organization, be sure to include a requirement to address cloud waste. Cloud optimization should require little to no manual work on your part by integrating into your cloud operations, allowing you to automatically reap the benefits and savings.

Here’s a first step on your optimization journey: pick a cloud account, plug it into ParkMyCloud, and get immediate recommendations for cost reduction. Click to apply the recommendations — or set a policy to do it automatically — and see the savings start to add up.

Originally published at www.parkmycloud.com on January 8, 2019.