The promise of public cloud is the allure of decentralization and agility. But without proper methods to gain oversight and ensure optimization, chances are you may be succumbing to a variety of sins that are costing you time, money, efficiency, and governance.

We’ve recently posted our latest eBook, Avoiding the 7 Deadly Sins of Public Cloud Costs, looking at all the ways your public cloud costs can spiral to the depths but also best practices for pulling your enterprise back up.

This is the second in a weekly blog series examining each of the seven sins (the first was on zombie resources). This week we’ll look at Sin #2: keeping resources going even when you don’t mean it.

Sin #2: Keeping Resources on 24/7

Ever leave the lights on in your garage for the entire night without noticing them? Hate it when that happens! And just like electricity, public cloud uses a pay-what-you-consume model. Thus, if you spin up public cloud resources and don’t turn them off when not in use (such as weekends or weeknights) you’ll pay out the nose without even realizing it.

If you’re running a big team or have lots of applications, this can get out of hand quickly.

Pushing owners to turn off their resources when not in use is an easy solution. You can use reports and dashboards to understand your usage and spot the underutilized resources. It’ll help you save and maintain resource efficiency.

Cleanse Your Organization of Public Cloud Cost Sins

Looking to learn more about the six other deadly sins of public cloud costs? Download the eBook today. Also be sure to check out our comprehensive AWS Cost Optimization Guide for best practices on AWS costs.

Save 20% on Public Cloud Costs, or We’ll Give You $1,000. Guaranteed.

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

• Zombie Resources Never Die: Avoiding Cloud Cost Sins
• Shadow IT Running Amok? Here’s How Cloud Control Solutions Can Help

With that, onto this week’s news:

How to approach infrastructure automation

Kevin Casey, The Enterprises Project, Jan. 19, 2021

“Standardization and automation are certainly not new concepts in IT. So why is infrastructure automation such a hot topic right now?

The short answer: Containers, orchestration, and other modern technologies have enabled an evolution of infrastructure automation capabilities that, among other benefits, let standardization actually be enforced.”

Control and governance top cloud security issues — Aptum

Aaron Hurst, InformationAge, Jan. 18, 2021

“82% of senior IT professionals told Aptum that control and governance have manifested themselves as security and compliance issues in the cloud, as infrastructure continues to expand and diversify.

Visibility through a single portal followed close behind as another common cloud security and compliance issue, which arises for 81% of respondents, while 80% said they had problems with gaining the ability to meet requirements of compliancy audits.”

Hybrid Cloud Adoption Brings Security on the Go

Sue Poremba, SecurityIntelligence, Jan. 15, 2021

“IBM’s Assembling Your Cloud Orchestra report found 85% of organizations already utilize a hybrid cloud and 98% anticipate having one in place within three years.

By not performing risk profiles, security teams and IT staff aren’t easily able to detect where, when and how an incident occurred or where new risks might appear. Keeping an eye on the hybrid cloud workflow and risks is a challenge no matter where the security team is based. One solution is the ‘single pane of glass’ architecture, which offers a way to monitor the entire system through a single display.”

Experience the leading cloud management solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

Can cloud control solutions, such as CloudBolt, help you rein in shadow IT? Shadow IT is a complex problem and requires a nuanced approach. Having the right tool is just one piece of a complex puzzle. 

So, what exactly is shadow IT? Shadow IT uses unsanctioned software, devices, and services outside the control or ownership of your organization. If left unchecked, shadow IT can also pose a grave security threat to your cloud environment. For instance, developers can fire up VMs outside the sanctioned cloud providers. Or they can even create back doors for accessing the organization’s internal systems. 

The NetEnrich 2019 Cloud Adoption survey said organizations spend between 20 percent to 40 percent of technology funding outside IT’s purview. In this era of easily sharable apps and increasingly cheaper devices, shadow IT is a priority for many organizations. It’s hard to know whether your cloud infrastructure is secure and compliant when others use technology behind your back. 

So, how can your organization combat this rampant problem? 

Reining In Shadow IT and How Cloud Control Solutions Can Help

Have Everything at Your Finger Tips

IT leaders must know where the organization’s data reside. They should also know how the organization is using it no matter what devices it uses. Taking such measures makes it easier to keep track of all devices, both new and old, accessing your cloud infrastructure. 

Have Regular Meetings with LOBs (Lines of Business)

One of the biggest causes of shadow IT is a cumbersome internal structure. Whenever you identify an instance of shadow IT, there should be a proactive response. Find out why that LOB did not report back to IT. Also, find out how you can improve processes around new software and devices. 

Interdepartmental coordination can help everyone to become more efficient and communicative. This reduces the risk of compliance breaches. 

Implement Technology 

Have you identified the issues causing shadow IT in your organization? Now, you need to take a proactive approach toward solving them. This is where technology comes in. The right cloud control solutions allow the organization to become more agile. The solutions also give you the visibility you need to stay on top of shadow IT.  

Manage Guidelines Around Applications and Devices

Establish rules to help employees better grasp what they can do and what they can’t do. Put in place processes to quickly approve or reject new software/technology sought by LOBs. 

Make Forgiveness a Core Part of IT Culture

Sometimes it’s impossible to prevent shadow IT. It happens, and it’s not always malicious. You want to build a forgiveness culture where users are not afraid to explain their actions for fear of punishment. This culture can help develop better communication across the organization. 

You Can’t Protect What You Can’t See 

Shadow IT is a threat to many enterprises because of the compliance and security risks it poses. By fostering better communication and monitoring architecture, your organization can manage shadow IT. Cloud control solutions enable IT to implement cloud governance and have complete visibility into cloud infrastructure. These tools provide data security tools to identify anomalies and trace cloud use to specific individuals or groups. 

Discover CloudBolt’s solutions to keep shadow IT at bay in your enterprise.

Sin #1: Zombie Resources Never Die

Welcome to this week’s edition of CloudBolt’s Weekly CloudNews!

Here are the blogs we’ve posted this week:

• Three Ways Cloud Cost Management Tools Can Curb Cloud Sprawl
• Azure Cloud Cost Control: Regaining Control of Your Deployment

With that, onto this week’s news:

Public cloud migration is ‘essential for survival’

Sead Fadilpašić, IT Pro Portal, Jan. 11, 2021

“For many IT leaders, large-scale public cloud migrations are crucial to the survival of their business in the aftermath of Covid-19.

This is according to a new report from cloud solutions provider Cloudreach, based on a poll of 200 IT leaders in the US, which states that Covid-19 and the move towards remote working was a key driver of cloud migration for 66 percent of firms.”

The year ahead: Security experts predict 21 key trends for ’21

John P. Mello Jr., TechBeacon, Jan. 11, 2021

“Amir Jerbi, CTO of Aqua Security, a cloud application security provider, explained that, because DevOps increasingly uses IaC templates to automate provisioning of cloud-native platforms, it is only a matter of time before vulnerabilities in these processes are exploited. ‘The use of many templates leaves an opening for attackers to embed deployment automation of their own components, which, when executed, may allow them to manipulate the cloud infrastructure of their attack targets,’ he said.

Booz Allen: ‘As cloud-hosted development environments become more popular,’ it continued, ‘these solutions may attract the same illicit activity that other development tools and resources have seen in previous attacks.’”

Is a hybrid cloud strategy the best one for businesses?

Tim Sandle, Digital Journal, Jan. 8, 2021

“The survey finds that close to half (54.6 percent) say their cloud strategy is best characterized as a hybrid-approach (which means some workloads on-premises and some in the cloud). A hybrid cloud is a technological solution that combines the private cloud with the use of public cloud services. This is a configuration where one or several touch points exist between the environments.

The advantage of a hybrid cloud solution finds that the majority of executives say that 56 percent desire greater control over what is where. This means being able to customize the private end of their hybrid cloud model to their specific needs and then adjusting them accordingly as they see fit. Consolidating on a cloud-only platform that can never scale to provide the performance and concurrency needed for business-critical workloads, no matter how much is invested, represents a poor cost-benefit solution.”

Experience the leading hybrid cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

Azure cloud cost control is one of the areas many enterprises focus on after moving to the cloud. After all, one of the key drivers of the move is significant cost savings. Making savings in the cloud is not a straightforward affair, and often enterprises spend more than they had anticipated. Undefined governance, cloud sprawl, and unexpected use of resources usually cause cost overruns.  

If you’re struggling to regain control of your Microsoft Azure costs, here are five ways to go about it. 

Reserved VM (Virtual Machine) Instances

Reserved VM Instances on Azure, or RIs, let you programmatically commit to a fixed number of VMs and sizes in your Azure cloud. Your commitment would last between one to three years. When you make such a commitment, Microsoft bills you at a fixed rate for compute. 

Taking this approach can save you a significant amount of money compared with using the pay-as-you-go model. With this model, you pay upfront for the committed usage and sacrifice the benefit of better cash flow management. 

Before discussing the Reserved VM option, you need to understand the risks and savings of the decision. Consider historical and forecasted resource utilization and runtime to figure out which Reserved VM Instances will work best for your organization. 

Azure Hybrid Benefits (AHB)

You can combine AHB with RIs to realize up to 70 percent of your cloud costs. RIs can help you achieve significant savings on compute. AHBs can help you save on Operating System (OS) and SQL Server costs. 

Does your organization own an SQL server or a Windows Server license with Software Assurance? Then you’re eligible to run VMs at Linux-based prices. Consequently, for the VM’s compute, you’ll only receive an hourly charge. There will be no charge for the additional OS and SQL server license. 

If your organization doesn’t have eligible licenses, you can still achieve reasonable cost savings with AHBs by buying new licenses. Long term, the cost savings can add up. 

Rightsizing VMs

Rightsizing is one of the key tenets of Azure cloud cost control. Rightsizing VMs entails maximizing the utilization of existing resources to minimize costs. To get rightsizing right, you must understand cloud utilization trends for your organization. Now, compare the utilization metrics to available VM sizes. 

Use third-party tools, such as CloudBolt, to help identify proper sizing. The key to getting it right is to constantly evaluate your VM needs and avoid the “set-it-and-forget-it” mentality. 

Scheduling VMs to Start/Stop Based on Usage Patterns

Scheduling may sound trivial, but it takes effort to analyze usage patterns and availability to make it work for your organization. You can use scheduling in conjunction with autoscaling to take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity and realize cost savings. 

Eliminate Wastage

The best way to eliminate wastage in the cloud is to set up a proper governance strategy. Cloud governance helps you to define what waste is and how to deal with it. One of the key tools of proper governance is resource tagging. It allows you to identify and manage resources based on the metadata assigned to them. 

Curbing resource wastage should be a critical component of your Azure cloud cost control strategy. CloudBolt provides best-in-class cloud governance tools to help eliminate wastage.

See what we can do for Azure cloud cost control today.

Can cloud cost management tools help your organization to manage cloud sprawl? 

Cloud sprawl has become a major concern for enterprises. The thing is, building in the cloud is elementary. IT can add features and services on the fly. But this often leads to unneeded, abandoned, or forgotten workloads that add wasteful costs to the cloud bill. 

Failure to rein in cloud sprawl by enacting effective management measures is a missed opportunity for modern-day enterprises. Consequently, IT needs to develop a comprehensive cloud management strategy and explore tools to deal with sprawl. 

Here’s how cloud cost management tools can help organizations deal with sprawl in the cloud. 

Implement Centralized Cloud Management

A Cloud Management Platform (CMP), such as CloudBolt, can help your organization get an initial handle on sprawl in your cloud environments. With such a tool in place, you can implement a management and governance strategy. This strategy will guide your stakeholders, managers, operations teams, and developers through the whole application life cycle. 

CMPs give IT a unified view to monitor workloads across clouds to track development, production, and test environments. In addition, IT can conduct regular resource audits through the CMP to help keep cloud sprawl at bay. A typical cloud audit includes applications, storage, compute, and other infrastructure components.

A proper audit also considers potential risks and necessary security updates. Compliance and security teams need to look at vulnerabilities, examine them, and develop a risk management framework that will address them.

CMPs also enable organizations to implement self-service cloud brokerage. This comes with a pre-approved catalog of services to help deal with cloud sprawl. Brokerage gives IT the budgeting and governance tools needed to govern and monitor the cloud usage of developers. 

Secure Access and Manage Critical Resources and Applications

Start by prioritizing secure access to cloud resources, in particular, business-critical applications. In the past, very few people, primarily DevOps teams, had access to cloud infrastructures. Today, more and more people interact with cloud infrastructures within organizations, so managing access is critical. Deploying applications and making engineering changes to cloud infrastructure has now become commonplace. 

Keeping track of applications is not a straightforward process. As cloud usage evolves and applications multiply, assumptions about the most suitable applications are often wrong. In a bid to keep up, enterprises need to monitor increases in the applications’ usage over time. As a result, it becomes easier to prioritize and ensure the availability of the most critical applications and guarantee optimal user experience. There is controlled access to the application to keep errors at a minimum. 

Cloud Optimization 

Monitoring cloud spending is not the preserve of the finance department. Cloud cost management tools can docket spending across all your cloud deployments. You can use these tools to optimize spending and get actionable insights such as CloudBolt’s Kumolus Cost Optimization product.

Your Cloud Deployment Isn’t Doomed to Sprawl

Cloud sprawl is not an inevitable outcome of your move to the cloud. Proper strategy and planning can help your organization to avoid cloud sprawl. Setting the right guardrails and using cloud cost management tools is a foundational step toward combating sprawl. 

See the latest cloud cost management tools from CloudBolt today.

A proper multi-cloud management system is critical if you’re to succeed in a multi-cloud setup. Undoubtedly, the emergence of AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure has given enterprises choices in this space. And sometimes the best choice is to not settle on one choice. 

Many organizations seek to take advantage of the varied offerings of multi-cloud architectures. But it can easily turn into a nightmare for an unprepared organization.

While multi-cloud environments are generally reliable, scalable, and highly available, they’re also challenging to manage. The more cloud services you procure from different providers, the more complex your cloud architecture becomes. As a result, you lose visibility and control over costs. 

As if that weren’t enough, multi-cloud also presents organizations with unique integration and security challenges. It’s easy for IT admins and cloud operators to feel overwhelmed. 

Here are some challenges you’re likely to face in a multi-cloud environment and how cloud management tools can help.

Difficulty Enforcing Governance and Compliance

Many organizations often have to meet multiple compliance requirements, both internal and external. Organizations must meet some of these requirements (e.g., FISMA, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX) irrespective of where their data reside. As a result, proper governance in the cloud is critical.

Multi-cloud environments are complex by their very nature. Therefore, organizations need the right tools to effectively implement security and governance policies. They need a multi-cloud management system to ensure compliance because of the clouds’ disparate nature in a multi-cloud setup. 

Siloed Vendor Tools

While cloud vendors provide proprietary tools to manage their environments, these tools don’t work across clouds. For this reason, IT admins have to juggle from one tool to the other, making management an uphill task. 

Enterprises should consider investing in tools designed to give them a consolidated view across different cloud environments and providers. 

Lack of App Management

It’s easy to lose track of the applications you’re running, where they’re running, and how much they’re costing you. It’s also easy to have several instances of the same app running simultaneously across multiple clouds because of staff preferences. This is a recipe for cloud cost sticker shock. 

Multi-cloud management can help you keep track of apps, so you don’t waste cloud resources. 

Spiraling Costs

Cloud sprawl in the multi-cloud is a reality. The cost of cloud services can quickly spiral out of control. You need tools that can ensure you have provisioned resources economically across clouds. 

Skills Shortage

On the surface, multi-cloud isn’t complicated. After all, it’s just the use of more than one cloud vendor. But it requires more sophistication than just managing several servers and load balancers in one cloud. IT teams need to be well-versed in working across disparate clouds. Most times, they’ll need specialized knowledge and experience with all the platforms the organization is using. 

Unfortunately, getting personnel with all these skill sets is no walk in the park. Multi-cloud management systems make it easier to manage different clouds since they aggregate everything on one tool. Once teams learn how to use the tool, they don’t need to have specialized knowledge of the different cloud environments. 

Experience the leading multi-cloud management and orchestration solution. Request a CloudBolt demo today.

A proper multi-cloud management system is critical if you’re to succeed in the multi-cloud setup. Undoubtedly, the emergence of Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure has given enterprises choices in this space. And sometimes the best choice is to not settle on one choice. 

Many organizations seek to take advantage of the varied offerings of multi-cloud architectures. But it can easily turn into a nightmare for an unprepared organization.

While multi-cloud environments are generally reliable, scalable, and highly available, they’re also challenging to manage. The more cloud services you procure from different providers, the more complex your cloud architecture becomes. As a result, you lose visibility and control over costs. 

As if that weren’t enough, multi-cloud also presents organizations with unique integration and security challenges. It’s easy for IT admins and cloud operators to feel overwhelmed. 

Here are some challenges you’re likely to face in a multi-cloud environment and how cloud management tools can help.

Difficulty Enforcing Governance and Compliance

Many organizations often have to meet multiple compliance requirements, both internal and external. Organizations must meet some of these requirements (e.g., FISMA, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX) irrespective of where their data reside. As a result, proper governance in the cloud is critical.

Multi-cloud environments are complex by their very nature. Therefore, organizations need the right tools to effectively implement security and governance policies. They need a multi-cloud management system to ensure compliance because of the clouds’ disparate nature in a multi-cloud setup. 

Siloed Vendor Tools

While cloud vendors provide proprietary tools to manage their environments, these tools don’t work across clouds. For this reason, IT admins have to juggle from one tool to the other, making management an uphill task. 

Enterprises should consider investing in tools designed to give them a consolidated view across different cloud environments and providers. 

Lack of App Management

It’s easy to lose track of the applications you’re running, where they’re running, and how much they’re costing you. It’s also easy to have several instances of the same app running simultaneously across multiple clouds because of staff preferences. This is a recipe for cloud cost sticker shock. 

Multi-cloud management can help you keep track of apps, so you don’t waste cloud resources. 

Spiraling Costs

Cloud sprawl in multi-cloud is a reality. The cost of cloud services can quickly spiral out of control. You need tools that can ensure you have provisioned resources economically across clouds. 

Skills Shortage

On the surface, multi-cloud isn’t complicated. After all, it’s just the use of more than one cloud vendor. But it requires more sophistication than just managing several servers and load balancers in one cloud. IT teams need to be well-versed in working across disparate clouds. Most times, they’ll need specialized knowledge and experience with all the platforms the organization is using. 

Unfortunately, getting personnel with all these skill sets is no walk in the park. Multi-cloud management systems make it easier to manage different clouds since they aggregate everything on one tool. Once teams learn how to use the tool, they don’t need to have specialized knowledge of the different cloud environments. 

See the multi-cloud management system you need in action. Sign up for a CloudBolt demo today.