Cloud Asset Management

What is cloud asset management?

Benefits of cloud asset management

Best practices in cloud asset management

Optimize your cloud asset management with the Vertice platform

Cloud asset management FAQs

Asset management is a key function to the running of any successful business. It’s a discipline that looks at how assets are procured, maintained, upgraded and disposed of in an efficient and cost-effective way.

Cloud asset management (CAM) applies this process to a company’s cloud environments. Most modern organizations use multiple cloud-based applications to manage their digital assets; CAM helps to organize those assets with greater levels of visibility and control, streamlining workflows and improving functionality.

Cloud asset management refers to both the management of assets in the cloud — such as customer data stored on external servers, mobile app APIs, etc. — and the management of constituent parts of your cloud environment.

The sheer volume of devices and solutions connected to a network at the enterprise level makes CAM impossible without the deployment of asset management software. Without asset management in the cloud, organizations risk facing mounting costs and cybersecurity breaches, as well as obscuring visibility of their own cloud infrastructure and the assets’ data within it. 

Cloud issues arise when organizations lose track of their cloud asset inventory. When companies introduce effective CAM procedures, they unlock a range of benefits, including:

• Visibility — One of the primary benefits of CAM is gaining full visibility over all of your assets in cloud or even multi-cloud environments. This in turn facilitates more accurate lifecycle management processes, leading to greater levels of optimization for all of your cloud contracts and cloud-based assets.
• Automations — A fundamental part of cloud computing and therefore CAM, automations are part of what makes the cloud so efficient. With automated features and services, cloud resources can integrate seamlessly with one another, and new asset costs can be tracked in real time.
• Security/compliance — Improved visibility often leads to improved cloud security — that is, you need one for assurances on the other. Cloud asset management solutions can tick the boxes of security and compliance regulations even as cloud environments continue to expand.
• Reduced cloud costs — Any solution that optimizes business processes will lead to reduced costs, which is exactly what you can expect from cloud asset management. When you have greater visibility across asset tracking, enhanced abilities to perform automations and better assurances over security, cost savings are virtually guaranteed.
• Scalability — Compared to on-premise solutions, cloud migration offers organizations the ability to scale their workloads at pace. One of the key metrics cloud providers such as AWS are measured on is scalability, with machine learning management tools able to monitor metadata as your company’s cloud use expands.

Although cloud-based asset management brings many benefits when done well, this isn’t a given — organizations still need to adhere to best practices to make it a success and improve asset lifecycles. 

Here’s what cloud-based asset management best practices look like:

1. Operational excellence – Operational excellence is a blueprint for all successful management processes, and CAM is no different. Automation, monitoring, notifications, alerts, data logging and reporting systems are all vital to successful asset management in the cloud. Understanding your organization’s cloud capacity and peak traffic times is also essential in order to maintain operational excellence.
2. Cost and performance optimization – Optimization is about having the necessary tools to effectively monitor cloud asset performance: what’s working, what isn’t, and how can we generate better value for money from our cloud services and products? These are the kinds of questions that lead to higher levels of optimization.Cloud cost optimization is closely linked to performance optimization, asking similar questions to glean whether employees are getting the most out of a service. Employees therefore play a crucial role in performance optimization, because improved visibility stimulates greater worker responsibility. Make sure you implement feedback loops from your employees to learn how your CAM application can be improved.
3. System reliability – Consistent and reliable system performance is important across all facets of business management. System reliability is first assured by service providers, but maintaining that reliability is a responsibility shared by everyone working within the system.

The rapid rate of digital transformation initiatives has resulted in half of organizations today experiencing increasing cloud costs, with annual increases typically over the 30% mark. We estimate that, on average, companies are wasting an average of $1m on their cloud services every year. 

The Vertice platform has been designed to reverse these pricing trends. For too long, cloud migrations and the use of cloud-based services and products have been overseen by inadequate management systems. Using our cloud asset management solution, your business can cut its cloud costs by up to 25%.

Our CAM platform helps optimize IT asset management and provides more accurate forecasts for the months and years ahead. It does this by:

• Automating the monitoring of your cloud environment for cost-saving opportunities. 
• Providing granular visibility of your cloud use to help you understand, control and forecast your costs, maintaining efficient collaboration between finance and tech teams.
• Implementing the platform at speed, offering near-instant access to automated savings, actionable cost-saving recommendations and easy-to-read dashboards.

The platform’s access to your cloud environment is through read-only permissions. We then aggregate all your cloud spend onto one platform, immediately offering insights once your connection is live. One of those insight tools is our Platform Instance Optimizer, which can cut compute spend by up to 60%.

The Vertice platform is the only integrated platform for cloud and software license spend. For more information about how our platform can perform cloud cost optimization and better align business operations, click on the link.