Multi-cloud environments allow unprecedented flexibility for each organization to create exactly the right mix of infrastructure for its needs. By making strategic use of public, private, and hybrid clouds, as well as on-premises data centers, you can meet the unique requirements of each service for performance, regulatory compliance, and cost according to the priorities of your business. But the move to multi-cloud can also bring unintended consequences if siloed technologies and information, software sprawl, and shadow IT undermine your ability to maintain complete, up-to-date asset and inventory data. As a result, you can easily become vulnerable to security gaps, infrastructure blind spots, and orphaned assets that drive cost without driving value.
The rising importance and complexity of application discovery and dependency mapping for multi-cloud environments has led many organizations to adopt BMC Discovery for Multi-Cloud. Providing a holistic, single-pane-of-glass view across the entire multi-cloud environment, the solution enables:
- Automated, agentless discovery and dependency mapping
- Seamless configuration, asset, and change management
- Infrastructure and operations support
- Application and cost modeling
- Advanced security, compliance, audit readiness, and risk management
Of course, the test of any solution’s effectiveness is the experience of those who use it. To assess the results customers are achieving with BMC Discovery for Multi-Cloud, we commissioned TechValidate to conduct a validated third-party survey. The most important finding: 89% of surveyed IT organizations are likely to recommend BMC Discovery. A deeper dive into the results reveals a fascinating view of digital transformation in action, including the priorities of various personas within the IT department, the specific use cases and processes the solution is used to support, and the resulting impact.
What end-to-end visibility means for multi-cloud IT
At a high level, BMC Discovery for Multi-Cloud delivers benefits in three main areas:
- Service awareness – By automatically capturing a complete view of the relationships between infrastructure and business services, organizations can improve utilization, optimize decision-making, manage compliance, and enable process automation for better quality and consistency.
- Enhanced security – Deep insight across the entire infrastructure enables IT to prioritize security resources according to business risk, accelerate threat response and vulnerability remediation, improve auditability, and root out high-risk legacy software.
- Cost transparency – Complemented with Apptio technology business management software, BMC Discovery for Multi-Cloud helps IT understand and optimize costs, calculate TCO, link IT investments to business results, and improve ROI.
The specific initiatives enabled by BMC Discovery provide further insight into its value for digital transformation. Respondents to the TechValidate survey planned to use its data to support:
- Audit and compliance – 65% of respondents
- Data center consolidation – 52% of respondents
- Cloud migration – 47% of respondents
Additional initiatives mentioned include the transition to DevOps, Big Data infrastructure, mergers & acquisitions, and IoT-enabled applications. This broad range of use cases is mirrored by the diversity of user roles relying on the solution; these include enterprise architects, asset managers, capacity planners, change managers, compliance and security managers, incident and problem managers, finance personnel, and system, network, and storage administrators.
The organizations implementing BMC Discovery are equally diverse. The number of servers scanned by customers range from under 1,000 (16% of respondents) to more than 10,000 (25%) and even 30,000+ (6%). Most of these organizations still run the majority of their compute resources on-premises, but 3% have migrated more than three-quarters of their resources to the cloud.
While the data captured in the TechValidate survey is extensive and illuminating, equally valuable are the many first-person quotes by BMC Discovery users on the features they find most useful, the solution’s user experience, its business value, and its bottom-line impact. To cite just one example, an IT specialist from a large insurance company reports that: “The product provides immediate return on investment. The discovered data is highly accurate and useful in a large number of applications in our environment. The product is extremely well designed, robust, and rarely has technical issue. Beyond that, it’s just a fun application to work with and manage.”
