Managing Your Hybrid Cloud

July 14, 2017 / G C Network / Comments Off on Managing Your Hybrid Cloud

How Cloud Brokerage Enables a Practical Path to Cloud IT

By G C Network | March 30, 2013

Join us on Wed, Apr 17, 2013 from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT to explore how to use cloud brokerage to move efficiently and securely to the cloud. More…

NJVC Cloudcuity Management Portal to Provide Secure Cloud Brokerage Services to NCOIC for NGA

By G C Network | March 28, 2013

CHANTILLY, Va., March 28, 2013 — NJVC®will lead efforts to provide secure cloud brokerage services to the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortiumusing its first-to-market Cloudcuity™ Management Portal during a series…

CloudCheckr : Amazon Complexity Challenges Many Users

By G C Network | March 25, 2013

     A recently released infographic from CloudCheckr (https://cloudcheckr.com/) sheds quite a bit of light on the importance of expert advice when an enterprise decides to deploy to the cloud.  When…

NJVC Announces Winner of Cloudcuity AppDeployer Contest Pilot at George Mason University

By G C Network | February 25, 2013

CHANTILLY, Va., Feb. 25, 2013—NJVC, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia, is pleased to announce the winner of the George Mason University (GMU) Student PaaS Developer Contest.…

Bahrain International eGovernment Forum 2013

By G C Network | February 23, 2013

I am honored to announce that I will be a speaker at the Bahrain International eGovernment Forum, April 8-10, 2013, being held at the Ritz-Carlton Bahrain Hotel and Spa, in…

Why the cloud will shake markets.

By G C Network | February 2, 2013

“Recently, I predicted that in 2013, cloud computing will provide the biggest disruption information technology has experienced in 25 years. These impacts extend to the $128 billion data center industry,…

Top 10 Transformational Impacts of the Cloud in 2013

By G C Network | December 21, 2012

CHANTILLY, Va., Dec. 20, 2012 — NJVC®, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia and supplier of Cloudcuity™ AppDeployer, and Virtual Global, a provider of cloud-enabled enterprise IT…

GovTech Innovator: Kevin Jackson

By G C Network | December 3, 2012

Today I am honored to be named a GovTech Innovator by Government Technology. My personal thanks goes out to Hilton Collins for letting me Hangout with him on Google+. Govtech.com…

How Will Technology Impact Your Business in 2020?

By G C Network | November 29, 2012

by Dennis Brouwer    (Repost from ThinkGig. Thanks for letting me contribute to your ebook!! – Kevin Jackson ) Human-like technology. The potential downfall of the data center. Hyper-personalization of…

The Government Cloud on KCUR-FM Central Standard with Jabulani Leffall

By G C Network | November 26, 2012

A big THANK YOU goes out today to KCUR-FM Central Standard host Jabulani Leffall, producer  Matthew Long-Middleton,and associate producer Danie Alexander for having me as a guest on this morning’s show!…

Photo credit: Shutterstock

 

Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis.  Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word.  Questions about how to manage cost variances and deviations with assets and cost across different suppliers abound. A  recent Cloud Tech article explained that while public cloud offers considerable cost savings in comparison to private or on-premises based alternatives, there may also be significant hidden costs. Operational features like auto-scaling can cause costs to soar in line with demand for resources, making predicting costs difficult and budgeting even harder. There is also an acute need for a holistic and heterogeneous system that can track the costs of cloud services from the point of consumption (e.g., an application or business unit) down to the resources involved (e.g., storage or compute service).
Sitting at the apex of all of these issues is the CFO or corporate Vice President of Finance. As the key budget manager for most organizations, it is where many of the key financial decisions are made. This is also where the spectrum of IT cost responsibility extends from the pure financial analytics tasks of:
  • Optimization;
  • Forecasting and projection; and
  • Financial reporting
To the pedestrian but crucial accounting tasks like:
  • Show-backs and charge-backs
  • Charge reconciliation; and
  • Budgeting policy management
The most prevalent cause of these financial problems is a failure to keep track of virtual assets in the cloud.  Many companies have lost complete visibility and control of cloud computing cost simply because they failed to tag and track these assets.  Unfortunately, this error is typically realized after hundreds or even thousands of cloud based assets have been instantiated.
Experts have also outlined a five-step process that help enterprises bring control and governance to hybrid cloud IT cost.
Step 1: Establish governance thresholds and policies for services
Step 2: Access your cloud service provisioning accounts
Step 3: Track the costs of the services, including recurring and usage-based costs
Step 4: Enforce compliance on the costs and asset usage using the purpose built cost analytics engines; initiate and track changes
Step 5: Simulate and optimize the control and compliance actions and better control your costs
Managing spend and assets across hybrid clouds also requires the availability of actionable data. This will help the CFO focus on which assets are performing as expected and which are not. Predictive analytics and insight-based recommendations can also help to drive the prioritization of changes that can have the most effective impact.
These sort of challenges can certainly be acute but the solution for helping organizations gain control of these issues will typically include holistic hybrid cloud management. In fact, financial organizations are just now realizing their critical role in managing the operational expenditure model embraced by cloud computing. Services specifically designed to address the financial management aspects of cloud metering, billing, workload management and service provisioning policies are just now hitting the marketplace.
One of these leading financial management services is provided by IBM. Their newly launched Cost and Asset Management application helps companies address escalating cloud costs and complexity while offering guidance into the next steps of hybrid cloud transformation. Through the use of predictive analytics to monitor and provide recommendations on a single dashboard, this service can provide finance and IT on one system of reference for hybrid cloud governance. This particular service can establish and enforce governance control points using financial and technical policies. Its ability to easily combine asset tags with policies can help the CFO identify and respond to financial variances before they become problems. Through the innovative use of Watson Cognitive services, this particular application can tap into a years of IBM experience to offer recommendations using built-in advanced analytics and cognitive capabilities. Acting on these suggestions can streamline cloud usage, predict future trends and identify waste.
If your company is currently experiencing these digital transformation challenges, learn more about managing hybrid IT finances at ibm.biz/ExploreCloudBrokerage. Establishing a focus on cloud governance, cost and asset management is a truly essential step towards expanding the operational benefits of hybrid cloud.

This post was brought to you by IBM Global Technology Services. For more content like this, visit IT Biz Advisor.

 

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