All the Amazing things a Cloud Management Platform can do for your Cloud Services Business
For organizations embarking on the digital transformation journey, embracing the cloud is probably the first stepping stone. However, while leveraging the power of the cloud, what they need is total visibility across their cloud investments. This includes actionable intelligence, critical automation, as well as accountability to truly transform their business. Since managing, optimizing and governing the cloud is not easy, that’s where a modern cloud management platform can help. By generating a complete picture of your cloud environment including billing details, accounts, resources, configurations, permissions, changes, the platform can enable you to improve cloud efficiency and security while simultaneously saving costs.
Why do you need a cloud management platform?
In a world that is submerged in data, unearthing insights is the only way businesses can understand customers, analyze market trends, and tweak strategies to outdo competition. Although we are surrounded by data, simply having access is not what matters; what matters is how you turn that data into insights to enhance business outcomes. As cloud looms over the business world, cloud management platforms are proving to be game changers. Comprising powerful cost allocation, spend optimization, and resource utilization solutions, they enable enterprises to optimize costs, security, and compliance in the cloud, and efficiently manage their multi-cloud infrastructure through a unified interface.
What insights does a cloud management platform provide?
As businesses across the world tailor cloud options to meet their distinct needs, visibility into clouds becomes a challenge; when you have so many cloud platforms, you really don’t know what’s in them: you don’t know how secure your environment is, you have very little idea of the actual costs you’re incurring, and you aren’t really sure if you’re meeting all compliance requirements. What a cloud management platform really does is provide end-to-end visibility across your cloud stack – visibility into security, visibility into cost management, as well as visibility into compliance. It offers a birds-eye view to manage and optimize public clouds. With custom reports and alerts, enterprises can identify wasted or underused resources and ensure governance and accountability, even as the environment scales. Being unified cost, security, inventory, utilization, and automation solutions, they enable enterprises to be more efficient in managing their public cloud operations, scale as the business grows, and ensure security. Built-in predictive analytics and purchasing recommendations provide much-needed insight into cloud spend and enable organizations to generate the largest possible savings. That said, here are some insights a cloud management platform can provide to modern enterprises:
1. Spend control: Given the fact that today’s enterprises leverage a variety of cloud services, keeping a tab on costs can be a Herculean task. Using a cloud management platform, organizations can gain deep insight into cost allocation, spend optimization, invoicing, and chargebacks. Through actionable visibility, organizations can drive efficient enterprise cloud management and limit cloud computing costs while improving performance and security.
2. Compliance: For public clouds especially, visibility across cloud infrastructure is essential for turning insight to action while meeting compliance demands. Using a cloud management platform, companies can unify processes across governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing, and receive alerts about critical configuration activities. With automatic mapping and grouping across different cloud vendors, modern enterprises can efficiently track and manage user permissions and ensure compliance across important frameworks.
3. Governance: Effective cloud governance is essential to protect cloud workloads and avoid breaches, fines, and other issues. Cloud management platforms can help enterprises maintain a secure cloud infrastructure, monitor changes, and receive alerts when misconfigurations are introduced as soon as they are. Organizations can automate the process of analyzing logs and act on alerts when issues are detected.
4. Excess capacity: For public cloud organizations, summary as well as detailed usage statistics of resources is important to run the business efficiently. Modern cloud management platforms offer actionable intelligence across cloud environments that allow enterprises to instantly identify opportunities to right-size and re-balance services efficiently. Using the platform, companies can efficiently manage critical CPU, network, memory, and usage statistics for all their public cloud services.
5. Cloud Metrics: Managing assets in a multi-cloud environment can be a harrowing task. However, with a cloud management platform, organizations can get a deep understanding of estimated costs, average CPU utilization, and track a host of other metrics. By leveraging sophisticated reporting across enterprise-wide inventory, they can successfully view data from public cloud services, assets, resources, and instances, all in one place.
6. Security: Considering how important risk management is in a world that is vulnerable to breaches, a cloud management platform can ensure the highest levels of security through best practices enforcement. Pre-built best practice checks help modern enterprises to continuously scan for accessible resources, open ports and protocols and mitigate risks – thereby ensuring compliance and security.
How does Synoptek use CloudCheckr to accomplish its cloud goals?
For a Managed Services Provider like Synoptek, agility and efficiency of cloud operations is a requisite for digital transformation. In a bid to deliver additional value to cloud customers, Synoptek – through its people and processes, and CloudCheckr – through its built-in tools – provide the visibility and insight needed for organizations to optimize business outcomes. Using CloudCheckr’s 500 best practice checks, Synoptek is able to reinforce its security posture, and automate key tasks across AWS, Azure, and Google Clouds. Synoptek makes the most of the integrated best practices to identify idle or unused resources, instance mismatches, and more. This insight, when combined with Synoptek’s processes enables the organization to re-strategize cloud workloads and elevate service levels for customers. Since the platform retains an audit trail of assets, it helps Synoptek instantly identify what’s running and what’s not – within the cloud environment – and tweak workloads for better optimization. Dashboard, summary, or heat map views offer key insights into individual resources as well as the entire public cloud deployment. What’s more, using the automated self-healing feature, Synoptek is able to automatically fix security and compliance issues via snapbacks, guardrails and automated security group cleanups, without human intervention, and deliver on the promise of a secure cloud every day.
Enable cloud business excellence
As more and more organizations embrace the world of cloud, a robust cloud management platform has become a mandate for business excellence. CloudCheckr is a highly flexible and customizable platform that helps companies like Synoptek meet unique needs as they scale in the cloud. With support for AWS, Azure, and Google cloud, CloudCheckr allows companies to gain visibility and control over their public cloud infrastructure, including cloud computing costs, performance, and security. If you are looking to save money, time, and effort to increase operational efficiencies with automated actions for your cloud, it’s time to leverage a cloud management platform like CloudCheckr and ensure security, compliance, and scale.
About the Author
Synoptek is an established firm that provides information systems consulting and IT management services. Synoptek and its predecessors have been providing these services for 23 years.