Concerned with improving security and controlling costs, enterprises are moving some percentage of workloads back to on-premises data centers and private clouds — at least in the short-term. In 2018, a survey by IDC found that organizations expected to move 50% of their public cloud apps to hosted private or on-premise environments in the near future. The Nutanix 2019 Enterprise Cloud Index has confirmed this trend through a separate survey, as well.
This shifting landscape of application deployments has shined a light on the need for enterprises to do a better job of controlling the usage and cost of their private and hybrid cloud resources.
Who’s on First and What’s on Second?
The popularity of cloud services, in general, has led to a proliferation of cloud accounts in enterprise companies across different departments, business units, and teams. Tracking cloud spend to keep costs from spiraling out of control is often a manual process, with admins pulling numbers into spreadsheets from multiple accounts and cloud environments. It’s complex and error-prone.
A general lack of visibility into who is using what resources makes it challenging for managers to apply IT chargeback costs to departments or to generate IT show back numbers for analysis. This lack of visibility into the full picture of cloud usage can also result in resources being overutilized and becoming unavailable to the users for whom they were initially provisioned—if those resources are being used anonymously, resulting in “shadow IT.”
Why has it been hard to identify hybrid cloud usage by team, product, project, etc.? It’s an old story in IT operations: admins have to deal with multiple management tools for public and private cloud environments instead of a single pane of glass. The added complexity caused by lack of enforcement of good tagging habits tends to let some important usage data fall through the cracks.
A Better Way to Manage Cloud Spend
Now there’s a better way to track and control which departments and individuals are using which resources and to gain visibility into whether resources are either under- or over-provisioned: cloud cost optimization with Xi Beam by Nutanix.
Cloud admins need to do three key things to track private cloud usage and costs:
- Gain visibility into private cloud spend across the enterprise
- Develop an effective tagging strategy to see who is using which cloud resources
- Track cloud spend against allocated budgets
With Beam, you get the capability to accomplish all three. Real-time visibility across private cloud architectures, teams, business units, and cloud boundaries is a game-changer for enterprise cloud administration. Admins can assign tags to understand what resources and services are being used by whom. For example, developers can deploy a tag for each application they’re building. Untagged resources are an easy way to uncover and eliminate shadow IT usage. Finally, the automation of budget tracking, chargeback, and showback helps you ensure that the right groups are paying for the resources they use.
Beam is a unified solution that works for all of your on-premises and off-premises workloads — private cloud, public cloud, and multicloud. It uses machine intelligence to continuously assess cloud usage and spend to provide optimization recommendations such as right-sizing resources and fixing security vulnerabilities. It also has 550+ audit checks to ensure compliance with regulatory policies and cloud best practices.
It’s a giant step forward to better private and hybrid cloud usage and cost governance at your organization, and you can also use it to manage public and multicloud service usage and spend in exactly the same way.
Step forward and check out your free trial of Xi Beam today.
© 2019 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. Nutanix, the Nutanix logo and all Nutanix product, feature and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nutanix, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their respective holder(s).