Cloud Asset Management (CAM) is the analysis, tracking, and recording of an organisation’s cloud usage – whether SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS – to help improve insight and visibility over the asset environment.
Why Cloud Asset Management?
Usually conducted using a dedicated cloud asset management application, it provides an organisation with information like where assets are, how they’re being used, what they’re being used for, how they’re connected, and how much they cost.
This information provides a method to overcome common asset management challenges, such as poor visibility, loss of control, unrecorded purchases and hidden costs. It offers an opportunity not only to be more reactive when change management projects are required but also to generate significant cost-savings.
How Does Cloud Asset Management Deliver Savings?
Cost-savings are delivered via any of the following processes:
- Identification and then cancellation of unused assets
- Identification and optimisation of underused assets
- Efficiency savings from replacing assets with high upkeep costs
- Early-identification of assets nearing contract/support/warranty deadlines for early renewal bonuses
Who Needs Cloud Asset Management?
Any organisation of any size can benefit from increased visibility over its cloud assets and the additional cost-savings accrued as a result. But, for larger organisations, the complexity of the cloud asset environment rises sharply, reducing visibility and understanding and bringing the potential for errors along with it. These companies will see the most benefit from CAM.
What are the Challenges of Cloud Asset Management?
In addition to those challenges already outlined, the primary obstacle for effective cloud asset management is that traditional asset management tools are ineffective. The associated complexities of the cloud and managing cloud assets include:
- Variances in workload priorities, e.g. temporary vs permanent
- The operationalisation and portability of workloads
- The facilitation of APIs and the necessity of standard workload layers
- The visualisation of complex asset-to-asset dependencies and relationships
And these cloud-specific nuances aren’t catered for by conventional asset management tools. The challenges posed by the cloud necessitate an alternative and bespoke approach, quite distinct from traditional methods.
What are the Benefits of Cloud Asset Management?
A specialist CAM application not only tends to these intricacies but, in doing so, offers a host of additional benefits such as:
- High-value reporting capabilities to capture a snapshot of the current asset environment
- The option to drill down into granular details at an individual asset level
- Facility to integrate with on-prem deployments for an end-to-end view of the architecture
- Visualisation capabilities that provide a clearer picture of how assets interact
- The opportunity to plan, procure and provision additional infrastructure from a single portal
Cloud Asset Management in Happi
Happi is a free-to-use tool that operates as a visual composer, marketplace, and cloud management platform, and ticks all the boxes when it comes to cloud asset management.
Its advanced GUI and visualisation capabilities, powerful management control panel, and intuitive design as a specialist CAM tool ensures it has the functionality to deliver visibility and insight into the asset environment on an ongoing basis.
And, what’s more, using its live-pricing integration, it’s possible to adapt and upgrade current asset configurations at the click of a button, choosing from industry-leading hosting giants such as AWS, Azure, and Oracle, as well as a whole host of niche vendors.