Although cloud computing represents perhaps the biggest change to IT in recent history, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Despite a seemingly constant call to “move to the cloud,” organizations must navigate a wide variety of service offerings and deployment models to determine what’s best for their requirements.
Organizations adopting cloud can use multi-cloud environments—multiple public cloud services, often along with on-premises physical, virtual, and private cloud infrastructure—in different ways. This adds elasticity and scalability to your infrastructure, but also makes it more difficult to gain a clear, holistic view across your IT ecosystem.
In this blog post, you’ll learn how multi-cloud discovery and cost control addresses cloud cost optimization challenges by providing valuable insight into your assets and their relationships across every environment. By allowing unprecedented visibility and management into this complex landscape, multi-cloud discovery and cost control enables you to optimize costs, reduce risk, and maximize your investment in a multi-cloud environment.
How Discovery Addresses Your Cloud Cost Optimization Strategy
This new, cloud-centric world requires agile and innovative ways to support your cloud deployment. Whether you’re running a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, or both, a diverse environment depends on sophisticated discovery to optimize its performance and maximize its potential.
While discovery may not be the first IT initiative that comes to mind during your transition to a hybrid or multi-cloud environment, it plays a critical role in managing all the moving pieces of your growing infrastructure. In fact, understanding the assets one owns and their dependencies has never been more relevant in a landscape that includes multiple vendors, different splits in responsibility, accelerated innovation delivery, and greater emphasis on automation.
A well-executed discovery initiative enables you to:
- Provide accurate asset information to assist decision making (e.g., change approval or release planning) and help resolve incidents and problems faster
- Define and maintain the components of business services, their role and ownership, how they relate to one another, and how they evolve over time
- Provide means and processes to guarantee data quality
These capabilities are ideal in any IT environment but become even more crucial with the move to cloud. As more and more production components get deployed in various cloud services, establishing streamlined discovery built on the objectives listed above helps you optimize costs and reduce the risks related to performance, availability, security, and compliance.
5 Key Requirements for Multi-Cloud Discovery
For discovery to positively impact your multi-cloud deployment, it must be able to execute these five things with precise accuracy:
- Know what’s out there
- Understand what compute resources and software you have deployed in multi-cloud environments
- Enable asset management and cost transparency processes by providing the inventory and relationships to cloud services
- Transform your IT strategy
- Model the current state to better assess which applications and services are good candidates to move as part of a cloud strategy
- Secure your infrastructure
- Identify unused or obsolete servers still utilizing compute resources in the cloud
- Identify version sprawl amongst the software and operating systems deployed on virtual machines in the cloud
- Manage your multi-cloud deployment
- Relate cloud services to incidents, problems, and changes to adhere to service management best practices
- Provide the dependencies of cloud services in support of change impact analysis
- Monitor your multi-cloud environment
- Provide application models, which include all cloud and internal infrastructure from hybrid cloud deployments, to understand dependencies and impact when events occur
- Support activities to ensure monitoring of the entire environment by identifying resources which may not yet be monitored
These capabilities enable you to manage, monitor, and measure your multi-cloud environment with the same accuracy, breadth, and security as a traditional internal data center.
Gain Visibility with BMC Helix Discovery
BMC Helix Discovery creates a dynamic, holistic view of data center and multi-cloud assets and the relationships between them. As a result, IT gains critical visibility into how infrastructure enables digital business—and how it can continue to provide and drive value.
BMC Helix Discovery scales across the largest and most complex multi-cloud environments, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, to deliver unparalleled insight into your diverse infrastructure. Unlike less sophisticated solutions, it serves as a single source of information via agentless and API discovery, so you get truly multi-environment application dependency mapping. It also discovers more asset types than any other discovery and dependency mapping tool on the market—with over 4,000 asset types and counting, and new vendors and resources added every month.
With BMC Helix Discovery, you can eliminate cloud asset sprawl, understand how vulnerabilities affect applications and infrastructure, and gain the deepest insight into your environment and assets.
The result? You spend less time worrying about what you have, and more time transforming your business.
Control Your Cloud Costs with TrueSight
BMC Helix Cloud Cost uses machine learning to optimize resource utilization and multi-cloud infrastructure costs. With simulated migration, you can properly determine public cloud resource needs, compare costs, and plan operational budgets. A single view of on-premises and public cloud infrastructure usage and spend keeps you in control of infrastructure costs and utilization. By automatically detecting anomalous spending patterns and tracking daily spend, you can prevent costly budget overruns. Additionally, automated recommendations for optimizing resource usage helps you reduce cost and eliminate wasted spend.
The Bottom Line
For most organizations, a multi-cloud environment already is or will soon be the reality. Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and as its offerings and capabilities expand, so will the ways in which organizations use it to their advantage. BMC Helix Discovery mitigates the complexity of a multi-cloud environment with a clear view into your assets and its relationships, no matter where its hosted. BMC Helix Cloud Cost leverages machine learning to optimize your multi-cloud costs. From public to private to hybrid and everything in between, get the visibility and control you need to make the most of your multi-cloud environment with BMC solutions.
