If your organization is looking to optimize costs, remember this: cloud visibility is key. After all, you can’t optimize what you can’t see. Without having a detailed view of what’s happening in your cloud environments, you won’t be able to see cost-saving opportunities or make your environment more efficient. We’ll cover cloud visibility – what it is, why you should prioritize it, and how to improve it to ultimately optimize costs.
What is Cloud Visibility?
In short, cloud visibility is having a comprehensive view of the activity within a cloud network.
Using cloud computing at your organization without thinking about cloud visibility is like looking through a dirty window – you may be able to see some things, but important details could be completely blocked out. Cloud visibility is important for many reasons but is especially helpful when it comes to spotting security vulnerabilities, unnecessary costs, and opportunities for improved performance.
Public Cloud Visibility
When you’re dealing with a public cloud environment, a lot can be managed by provider tools, offering strong visibility.
Cloud visibility in the public cloud can come from monitoring the following:
- Infrastructure visibility: The underlying infrastructure that supports cloud services, including servers, storage, and network components.
- Application visibility: Performance and usage of applications running in the cloud, which can include metrics like response times, throughput, and error rates.
- User visibility: User behavior and activity within the cloud environment, including authentication and access control, plus usage patterns and trends.
- Data visibility: The flow and storage of data within the cloud environment, including data security and compliance requirements.
- Service visibility: Performance and availability of cloud services, including uptime, availability, and response times.
According to Gartner, nearly half of spending on IT will go to the public cloud by 2024. By having visibility into these different areas, organizations can better manage their cloud resources, ensure compliance with regulations and security requirements, and ensure cloud optimization and usage.
Why Prioritize Cloud Visibility to Optimize Cost?
Cloud visibility is essential for developing a strategy to optimize cloud costs because it provides insights into how cloud resources are being used and where potential inefficiencies or wasteful spending may be occurring. Without visibility, companies may be unaware of unused or underutilized resources, resulting in unnecessary costs. Here are some reasons why a company should prioritize cloud visibility to optimize costs:
Identify Underutilized Resources
With visibility into cloud usage, companies can identify underutilized resources and take steps to either decommission them or optimize their usage to reduce costs.
Track Resource Consumption
By tracking resource consumption over time, cloud visibility allows organizations to forecast usage and budget accordingly.
Optimize Resource Allocation
Analyzing usage patterns gives companies the opportunity to optimize resource allocation to ensure effective and efficient use of resources.
Identify Cost-Saving Opportunities
With visibility into usage and spending, companies can identify opportunities to reduce costs, such as by leveraging discounts or rightsizing instances to better match workload requirements.
Ensure Compliance
Cloud visibility can help companies ensure compliance with regulations and security requirements, avoiding potential fines and penalties that could impact their bottom line.
In summary, it’s crucial for companies that want to optimize their cloud costs, improve resource usage, and ensure compliance with regulations. By prioritizing cloud visibility, companies can make informed decisions and take action to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and ultimately, drive business success.
Challenges with Cloud Visibility in Cloud Computing
Data Overload
Public cloud environments generate vast amounts of data, including logs, metrics, and events. Without effective filtering and aggregation, this data can quickly become overwhelming, making it hard to identify critical issues and trends.
Complexity
Public cloud environments can be complex and complexity has potential to obscure visibility, with multiple services and applications running on different platforms and infrastructure. This can make it difficult to gain a comprehensive view of the entire environment and understand how everything is connected and increase potential risk.
Lack of Standardization
Each public cloud provider has its own tools and APIs for monitoring and managing resources. Standardizing cloud visibility across multiple clouds becomes challenging as a result.
Despite what organizations are up against, there are measures they can take to improve their cloud visibility.
How to Improve Cloud Visibility
Organizations need to address the problem from more than one angle. A multifaceted approach to address visibility challenges can include the following strategies:
Use Monitoring Tools
Cloud monitoring tools provide a centralized view of cloud resources and their performance. They can help track and report on metrics like CPU utilization, network traffic, and disk usage, enabling administrators to optimize resource usage, detect and resolve issues, and plan capacity.
Implement Logging
Cloud logging tools capture and store data on events and activities that occur within the cloud environment. This data can be used to troubleshoot problems, investigate security incidents, and provide audit trails for compliance purposes.
Leverage Automation
Automating processes is largely a positive thing. By automating tasks, organizations remove friction from areas of the business that are easy to repeat without human intervention. However, too much automation without proper planning can reduce visibility. Standardizing the automation tools used organization-wide can keep disparate pieces from getting lost.
Automation tools can help streamline cloud management tasks and reduce errors, making it easier to maintain a consistent view of the cloud environment. Automation can also help enforce compliance policies, such as resource tagging or access controls.
Implement Security and Compliance Controls
Security and compliance controls, such as identity and access management (IAM) and encryption, are essential for maintaining the security and integrity of the cloud environment. They should be implemented to ensure that only authorized users and applications have access to cloud resources.
Use Third-Party Tools
Many third-party tools offer additional capabilities and integrations with public cloud providers, allowing companies to gain deeper insights into cloud performance and usage. These tools can help address specific challenges, such as cost optimization or compliance reporting, or advanced analytics to uncover useful insights.
Improving visibility in these ways can all be accomplished with cloud visibility tools.
Enhance Your Cloud Visibility Tools
What are Cloud Visibility Tools?
Cloud visibility tools include anything that allows your teams to see what is happening in your cloud environments. These tools could be valuable from an IT, security, network, or leadership standpoint and can help you gain a better understanding of what might need to be optimized in the cloud or what might be having some issues. Monitoring through cloud visibility tools can help you solve problems and find efficiencies.
There are two main types of cloud visibility tools – native and third-party tools. Each have strengths and weaknesses, as well as some key differences.
Features and Capabilities
Native cloud monitoring tools are built specifically for the cloud platform they support. This means they are deeply integrated with the cloud platform and can offer unique features that third-party tools may not be able to provide. For example, AWS CloudWatch offers in-depth monitoring of AWS r esources, and Google Stackdriver has specialized monitoring for Google Cloud Platform services.
On the other hand, third-party tools often offer a wider range of features, integrations, and customization options than native cloud tools.
Ease of use
Because native cloud monitoring tools are built into the platform, they often require minimal configuration and are easier to set up and use than third-party tools.
However, third-party tools can simplify cloud management tasks with more intuitive user interfaces and workflows.
Scalability
Native cloud monitoring tools can scale automatically with the cloud platform, ensuring that monitoring capabilities can keep up with the scaling of the cloud environment.
Third-party tools may require additional configuration and resources to scale effectively.
Cost
Native cloud monitoring tools are typically included in the cost of the cloud platform, while third-party tools may require additional licensing or subscription fees.
Even with this additional licensing, third-party tools may offer more cost-effective options for specialized monitoring needs or larger environments.
Customization
Third-party tools often provide more options for customization than native cloud monitoring tools, allowing companies to tailor monitoring capabilities to their specific needs. Native cloud tools may be more limited in their ability to customize.
Optimize Cost by Improving Cloud Visibility with TierPoint
Your cloud infrastructure is as unique as your business, and it requires a unique approach to ensure you maximize visibility and minimize cost. TierPoint can help you find the best cloud visibility tools for your environment, allowing you to stay secure, gain insight, and ultimately lower costs.
Interested in gaining more insight into your cloud spend? Get a free cloud cost analysis and discover how our solutions can reduce costs by up to 30%.
