With computing resources scattered amongst premises and multiple cloud providers, managing resources effectively becomes challenging. It’s difficult to track where resources are and how they’re being used, and it’s hard to understand whether you’re spending wisely.
Tagging resources is a start at this, but tagging only goes so far; it’s a manual process prone to errors. Tags also only tell you where resources reside. They don’t tell you how they’re being used and the consequences of removing a resource. Here are some additional ways to improve how you track and manage cloud resources to help you control cloud spending.
Understand Your Data
Focusing solely on physical infrastructure like servers and storage devices will miss big opportunities for controlling costs. Cloud spending decisions often focus on the physical cloud resources, but many times those decisions should be driven by data considerations instead. By understanding your data, you can classify and tier it appropriately, so that data is stored on cost-effective platforms. You’ll also reduce the need for potentially costly data transfers to move data between platforms.
Get Visibility Into A Cloud
Start by using the vendor-provided tools to get single-platform visibility. While this provides a limited view, it gives you a place to start. If you’re using Amazon Web Services, VPC Flow Logs provide detailed information about IP traffic. Other tools for monitoring AWS include CloudTrail and CloudWatch. Microsoft Azure offers Azure Monitor and Google Cloud Platform offers Stackdriver with similar monitoring capabilities.
Gain Visibility Across Clouds
Single cloud provider tools will never provide a holistic view of your infrastructure. That requires third-party products like CloudHealth to collect and consolidate data from all your cloud platforms. A third party product that gathers data from across platforms allows you to do more complete analysis of your utilization and spending, taking into consideration the cloud provider, business units, and other factors.
In addition to tracking current spending, you can forecast future spending. CloudHealth also provides insight to help reduce spending and apply policies to ensure efficient usage of your cloud resources.
Be Proactive in Managing Multi-cloud Usage
It’s far more effective to take a proactive approach in managing multiple clouds. Rather than analyze spending only as a new budget cycle begins, invest in VAST View, powered by CloudHealth, to gain real-time insight and reporting that allows you to fine-tune your multi-cloud spending throughout the year. Contact us to learn more about using VAST View to track and manage your multi-cloud resources.
