Cloud Visibility

What is cloud visibility?

Challenges posed by limited cloud visibility

Opportunities cloud visibility offers to businesses

Gain unparalleled insights into your cloud usage and spend

Pinpoint savings opportunities with total cloud visibility

Reduce friction between Finance and DevOps

Cloud visibility FAQs

Cloud visibility refers to an organization’s ability to have a clear and comprehensive view of their cloud infrastructure, usage and spend.

It typically involves tracking the utilization and performance of cloud resources such as virtual machines, storage, databases and networking components, while analyzing spending patterns across each service, project or department in order to identify cost optimization opportunities.

Why is cloud visibility hard to achieve?

In short – because cloud environments won’t stop growing. The average business uses at least 100 different cloud apps in 2024, with larger enterprises easily topping 400. As use cases evolve and software proliferates, gaining a holistic overview of an organization’s entire cloud ecosystem gets increasingly difficult. 

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Sprawling cloud landscapes generate a deluge of data in the form of logs, metrics, and traces that can quickly become overwhelming. The inherent scalability that makes cloud services so appealing also adds to the challenge. 

Moreover, cloud environments at larger organizations are rarely monolithic, often leveraging a mix of public clouds (e.g. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure), private clouds, and on-premises data centers. The fragmented landscape is hard to consolidate without a clear roadmap, posing an extra challenge for cloud and multi-cloud visibility.

Focusing on cloud visibility is fundamental for several high-profile reasons. Organizations can face the following challenges if their management strategies aren’t effective:  

• Blind spots – Cloud visibility is crucial to avoiding blind spots in an organization’s SaaS stack. These landscapes are often extremely complex, with hundreds of applications interacting across a network using multiple coding languages. Effective management is impossible if certain areas aren’t visible, throwing up significant issues. Blind spots not only cause potential security issues but reduce opportunities to manage wastage and optimize workloads. The Vertice platform visualizes your cloud network to help eliminate gray areas and provide complete cloud visibility. 
• Vulnerabilities – Cloud security is generally more demanding than on-premises networks, mainly due to the complexity and size of enterprise SaaS stacks. Security teams must cover far more ground, making it easier to miss chinks in an organization’s armor. For example, a vulnerability in an unpatched cloud service deployed on Microsoft Azure could be exploited by attackers, leading to a data breach and avoidable costs. Organization security posture is compromised without complete visibility over a cloud network, so it’s a particularly pertinent reason to optimize your strategy. 
• Inefficient spending – Limited cloud visibility naturally leads to inefficient spending. Businesses cannot achieve cost optimization without clear insights into resource allocation and general usage. Imagine a scenario where a DevOps team mistakenly provisions a high-powered server for a low-traffic service operating in the background of a project. Without the cloud visibility to highlight this resource usage, an organization could carry a financial burden for no reason. The Vertice platform provides a birds-eye view of your cloud usage and spend to pinpoint areas for improvement. Cloud bills can increase by an average of 35% year-on-year, so limiting inefficient spending has never been so important.
• Underutilized resources – Poor cloud visibility doesn’t only influence inefficient spending, it also leads to chronically underutilized resources. For example, a marketing team for a large enterprise could mistakenly opt for a cloud subscription that dwarfs the project’s resource usage, particularly if the problem involves technical decision-making involving data the team is unfamiliar with. Limited cloud visibility would mean this goes unnoticed, whereas a more centralized approach with unified data would quickly highlight the discrepancy. The team could reduce spending or ramp up the marketing campaign accordingly, creating much better value.

 Cloud and multi-cloud visibility generate significant opportunities for businesses to streamline and optimize their cloud operations. For example: 

• Remediation – Cloud visibility encourages consistent fine-tuning and remediation for security, compliance, or general efficiency. Unified real-time data from across a cloud network allows you to identify performance issues, security threats, configuration errors, or regulatory oversights quickly and effectively. Try troubleshooting a problem without seeing the complete picture – each stab in the dark wastes resources and potentially elevates threat levels. Cloud visibility allows a pinpoint approach to remediation, optimizing your operations. 
• Orchestration – Cloud and multi-cloud visibility offers an opportunity to streamline orchestration across a network. Musicians cannot perform a symphony without both hearing one another and having guidance from a central conductor. The same goes for containerized cloud applications. Organizations can leverage orchestration tools like Kubernetes to automate, standardize, and optimize cloud applications. However, without the data insights revealed by complete cloud visibility, they will be fighting a losing battle. On the other hand, readily-available metrics allows Kubernetes to optimize deployments, scaling, and resource allocation more effectively. In effect, the conductor is finally able to see the orchestra. 
• Scalability – Complete cloud visibility is the key to efficiently scaling resources up or down across a network. Consistent monitoring and data logging uncovers usage patterns that can represent clear opportunities to resources more effectively. Whether this is rightsizing to optimize cloud costs or spotting an area where operations could be expanded to drive more revenue, the same principles apply. 
• Security – Robust network security is a mission-critical concern in all organizations, no matter their overall function or size. Cloud and multi-cloud visibility improve security posture by identifying potential vulnerabilities like misconfigurations or unauthorized access attempts before they can be exploited. This proactive approach pays serious dividends, simultaneously optimizing security resources to be as cost-effective as possible and curtailing extra costs and workloads caused by a serious security breach. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) and identity and access management (IAM) tools can significantly improve mitigation through the cloud visibility they enable. The Vertice platform also provides readily available insights into vendor compliance and security information to ensure you build your stack with strong security at the foundations. 
• Observability – Cloud visibility requires an organization to move beyond basic monitoring towards fully-fledged observability. This involves a deeper understanding of a cloud network on a more observable level. Use the Vertice platform, for example, and you’ll see a visualized breakdown of your cloud stack using logs, metrics, and traces to analyze application performance, cost allocation, and the security health of your cloud environment.  
• Multi-cloud visibility – Strategies to implement better cloud visibility, like orchestrated containerizations and integrated dashboards, will lead to improved multi-cloud visibility if an organization ever needs to scale up. Strong foundations in this regard help businesses approach cloud spend more dynamically. For example, you might find a certain SaaS is more efficient running on a particular cloud provider or as part of a private cloud. But you would never know without the essential multi-cloud visibility required. 
• Actionable insights – Cloud and multi-cloud visibility generates an optimal foundation for actionable insights across an organization. The holistic and exhaustive approach to data collection fuels sustained insights into everything from cost allocation to security and compliance. But the real difference compared to limited cloud visibility is the speed it takes to resolve issues with these insights. Through orchestration, aggregation, and clear contextualisation, businesses can take action without requiring any further research or troubleshooting. For example, the Vertice cloud cost optimization platform can cut cloud spend by 25% thanks to granular visibility, anomaly alerting, and smart approval workflows – insights that can be actioned immediately to optimize your cloud network.

Lack of cloud visibility is often a major challenge for finance leaders, with many unaware of what exactly is contributing to their cloud bill and why costs are increasing by an average of 35% year-on-year. 

With Vertice, you can now easily understand how your cloud spend adds up with a visual breakdown of your cloud estate, for example by product, service, category or purchase option. You will also be alerted in real-time to any irregularities in your usage that may impact cost. 

With this insight, you can more accurately attribute your costs and forecast spend.

Not only is a manual approach to cloud management incredibly difficult, but even with a dedicated cloud FinOps team it’s virtually impossible to uncover every saving.

With continuous monitoring of your cloud health, Vertice can uncover all idle and underutilized resources, enabling you to make more informed decisions on which services need to be right-sized, suspended or shut down.

The platform also provides you with full visibility of your Reserved Instance (RI) inventory, allowing you to manage everything in one place, while benefiting from Vertice’s advanced algorithms that trade these RIs on your behalf.

In many organizations, there’s an ever-growing tension between finance and tech teams. While the CFOs goal is to manage the cost of cloud utilization and ensure the budget is spent wisely, the CTO is focused on leveraging technology to become a market-leading solution and achieve a competitive advantage.

With limited cloud visibility, finance leaders are often reliant on their technical colleagues to demonstrate cloud efficiency and provide a breakdown of how the budget is being spent. For many, this is a challenge, with 55% citing the lack of transparency as their number one issue.

With Vertice’s Cloud Cost Optimization platform, this no longer has to be a problem. By providing all stakeholders with a unified and simplified view of cloud spend and usage, Vertice reduces friction between teams, while further improving collaboration.