Tagging is a big deal when using public cloud—let’s talk about a few key aspects on this broad topic. Whether an organisation is utilising a single public cloud provider or leveraging the benefits of a multi-cloud strategy, there is a wide variety of resources, services, and costs to manage, analyse, and report on. An important part of this is having a consistent and effective tagging strategy. Tags are metadata values (names and labels given to stuff) that provide identifying information about resources and their purpose. Successfully realising value from tagging has some challenges, starting with simply defining and structuring tags.
Defining the tags to be used and how they are structured should be kept simple: look to how your business is already structured and consider the type of questions you are trying to answer, like “How much do we spend on cloud resources to deliver a service?”
Two key answers that should always be answered by tags: WHAT is this resource for and WHO is responsible for it? Here are some typical examples for what tags can identify:
With a solid tagging strategy in place, your business benefits from valuable visibility and operational capabilities.
Reporting: this broad function includes cost visibility as well as operational status. Well-structured tags provide the ability to generate meaningful and valuable reports, answering key questions like:
Tagging is relatively consistent between providers and there are some differences to be aware of when using multi-cloud.
1. Letter case sensitivity (e.g. ‘ForExample’ vs ‘forexample’) should be consistent and strictly followed. Otherwise, be mindful of the following.
2. Apply no more than 50 tags per resource. This is an AWS and Azure limitation, where GCP allows for 64.
3. Use keys and values with no more than 63 characters. This is a limitation on GCP, while AWS (Key/Value:128/256) and Azure (Key/Value:512/256) allow higher limits.
4. Enforce tags as a policy. These are best applied at the point of deployment/provisioning, whether manual or automatic. Landing Zones, offered by all the public cloud providers, are intuitive and ensure these tagging policies are created and enforced.
5. Apply more tags at the start. You don’t need to limit yourself to just a couple of tags—if you don’t effectively some tags in the future, no harm done.
A successful tagging strategy depends on automation, crucially at the point of provisioning to ensure tags are applied. To support this, good cloud management tooling is important. When considering management tools, look for key functionality such as the ability to apply new tags to existing resources and the ability to filter everything based on tag keys and values.
Kumoco Cloud Manager ensures that you have a successful tagging strategy and offers these key functionalities. Get in touch today for a demo.
With cloud computing growth increasing, enterprises’ cloud consumption is a major contributing factor. From digital currency adoption to prioritising the use of machine learning, there are many existing and emerging technologies that promise both improved operations and reduced costs. Those promised benefits are not always straight-forward to realize.
Let’s look at some of the key challenges and solutions.
Cost-Effectiveness: Visibility and Allocation
The biggest headline opportunity in moving to the public cloud is significantly reducing costs. Promised as being quick, benefiting from economies of scale, and removing the worries of aspects like redundancy and backups, it is easy to jump into the public cloud and spend even more money. Being easy to quickly provision resources, try new technologies, and scale-up, it is a buffet of possibilities that can get out of control if not monitored.
Visibility of costs across a cloud estate is the first major hurdle. For enterprises, knowing the total cost is not enough: they need to understand those costs according to a meaningful allocation breakdown. This could be a breakdown of costs according to projects or programs, cost centers, services, or business units—anything that helps provide visibility and, most importantly, ownership to costs so that they can be managed. Cloud management tools should handle this allocation and visibility of costs automatically, saving human effort from manually slicing-and-dicing within spreadsheets and providing near-real-time visibility.
Resource Optimisation: Automated Recommendations
The use of public cloud technology has a long maturity journey and no matter where an enterprise business is on that, the need to optimise resources without a lot of human effort is critical to keep costs down. Whether a business is relatively new to the public cloud and utilizing just virtual machines on the public cloud or is further along in maturity and using PaaS or serverless technologies via DevOps and/or CI/CD, there are many opportunities to let technology both automatically scale up/down and adjust configurations to be the most cost-effective.
Cloud management tools should support this initiative through continual assessment of deployed resources, providing recommended changes that can either be acted on manually, realized automatically through approved changes or in subsequent deployments that are adjusted for the workload. Enterprises should look for a cloud management tool that supports both the current and future resource types that they consume in the public cloud.
Compliance: Automated Auditing and Remediation
The public cloud typically uses the latest-and-greatest technologies available. This provides an inherent benefit of operating systems, applications, and software that has the latest security considerations and best practices already in place. There are still many factors that a business must still consider and be prepared to address to ensure security compliance. With the ease of deploying resources, either manually or through automated deployments, the need for continual security compliance auditing is a must, especially for enterprises that often have their own policies that need to be enforced and checked.
Enterprises are best served in managing public cloud security considerations through fully automated auditing tools as the volume of cloud resources is not practical for humans to manually conduct audit checks.
Cloud management tools like Kumoco Cloud Manager provide a continual assessment of security considerations at the account level and down to the resources themselves.
Even better, the ability to automatically remediate, or correct, any audit failures is important, as it means security issues are resolved faster, especially when there are already change management processes to consider.
Want to know how cloud management solutions like Kumoco Cloud Manager can support your enterprise? Book a demo.
Cloud computing, as a concept, has been around since the 1960’s. The earliest use cases didn’t see much light until the 1990’s and it took another decade before cloud as we know it today started to take shape. Despite this long history, the transition to true cloud computing for large businesses continues to be both an opportunity and a challenge. When starting to act on that opportunity, it is natural to move through a stepped approach, each being indicative of both business and technology maturity within a business.
Maturity in the use of cloud computing can take many different views. From casual or internal project definitions to defined frameworks like the Cloud Maturity Model by the Open Alliance for Cloud Adoption, there is a lot to consider and act on. In simplistic technology terms, this is often represented as the move from ‘physical to virtual’, where ‘physical’ is often on-premise, utilising cloud infrastructure as a service in a “lift and shift” activity, progressing toward cloud-native technologies and finally at a maturity point of being able to proactively adopt emerging technologies.
Initial phases are often delivered through manual processes and actions that do not leverage the benefits of automation or software tools. While such tooling may seem like overkill, the willingness, or lack of, to use software tools and automation shares a lot of similarities to a business’s willingness to progress the maturity of their cloud computing usage. Here we are in 2022 and massive global enterprises are still using Excel spreadsheets to manually slice-and-dice to understand their cloud computing costs. Businesses employ teams of people to conduct repetitive, laborious tasks resulting in 100s of hours of work that is no longer necessary.
Psychology tells us that we resist change because it takes us out of our comfort zones, even when that can make things more difficult for us; and so it is with progressing in cloud maturity. The amount of effort in making the first colossal shift to cloud computing, that first “lift and shift” type activity, can create apprehension that continued progress will be even more hard work—because it was done manually, without the benefits of software tooling and automation. In this we recognize that continued cloud maturity requires moving beyond manual tasks, embracing software tools and automation that free up employees to do meaningful and valuable work that we are better suited to.
Even in the first “lift and shift” activities, software tooling can simplify and accelerate cloud migration. When there are so many options, why spend months, even years, analysing the required compute capacity to migrate to cloud, over-analysing size and compute-type requirements in an attempt to get it right? One of those options is to simply move everything and then let software tooling take care of sizing and capacity automatically—with little to no human involvement required. Sounds scary? Yes, we resist change, even when we know it is likely to be better for us.
Want to know more about how software tooling and automation can accelerate your cloud adoption?
Get in touch to explore Kumoco Cloud Manager and save 100s of human hours with our state-of-the-art automation.
There are numerous advantages to becoming an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP). This prestigious designation is an endorsement from Microsoft that your company is one of the most capable and high-fidelity Azure MSPs – and that’s a coveted differentiator.
Companies that achieve Azure Expert MSP status can expect accelerated revenue growth, the creation of new revenue streams, and first-class access to Microsoft co-sell engagements and MSP business support.
Businesses want partners that they can count on as Managed Service Providers (MSPs), which have a lot to deliver.
Agree with this or not, certifications are a key indicator that MSPs are invested in their customer’s success. For MSPs offering cloud management on Microsoft Azure, Expert MSP Certification is a critical avenue to drive revenue.
One key aspect of certification is the tooling provided to customers by their MSP. Customer portals not only need to feel intuitive and easy to use, but they also need to offer a variety of practical capabilities.
A common misconception is that all cloud users must or should use the native cloud provider portals.
For MSPs with fully managed offerings, this is not the case and customer’s users need an interface that supports them in understanding and acting on their cloud accounts.
The right tool has a lot to deliver on:
Platforms like ServiceNow provide these through proven track records and enable partners like Kumoco to bring world-class cloud management capabilities to the table.
Underlying capabilities like workflow processes, automation, and orchestration are provided by enterprise platforms.
With the right tooling, customer interactions are more efficient and effective — and that is an important consideration when looking at passing an audit for being an Azure Expert MSP.
Ready to go, out-of-the-box capabilities offered by the cloud management expertise of Kumoco Cloud Manager on ServiceNow act as accelerators to meeting audit requirements, shifting expectations of year-long implementation timelines to as little as six weeks.
With ServiceNow partners, you can count on to bring effective tooling. You can accelerate revenue growth through the opportunities provided by Microsoft Azure Expert MSP Certification.
There are numerous advantages to becoming an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP). This prestigious designation is an endorsement from Microsoft that your company is one of the most capable and high-fidelity Azure MSPs – and that’s a coveted differentiator.
Companies that achieve Azure Expert MSP status can expect accelerated revenue growth, the creation of new revenue streams, and first-class access to Microsoft co-sell engagements and MSP business support.
Businesses want partners that they can count on as Managed Service Providers (MSPs), which have a lot to deliver.
Agree with this or not, certifications are a key indicator that MSPs are invested in their customer’s success. For MSPs offering cloud management on Microsoft Azure, Expert MSP Certification is a critical avenue to drive revenue.
One key aspect of certification is the tooling provided to customers by their MSP. Customer portals not only need to feel intuitive and easy to use, but they also need to offer a variety of practical capabilities.
A common misconception is that all cloud users must or should use the native cloud provider portals.
For MSPs with fully managed offerings, this is not the case and customer’s users need an interface that supports them in understanding and acting on their cloud accounts.
The right tool has a lot to deliver on:
Platforms like ServiceNow provide these through proven track records and enable partners like Kumoco to bring world-class cloud management capabilities to the table.
Underlying capabilities like workflow processes, automation, and orchestration are provided by enterprise platforms.
With the right tooling, customer interactions are more efficient and effective — and that is an important consideration when looking at passing an audit for being an Azure Expert MSP.
Ready to go, out-of-the-box capabilities offered by the cloud management expertise of Kumoco Cloud Manager on ServiceNow act as accelerators to meeting audit requirements, shifting expectations of year-long implementation timelines to as little as six weeks.
With ServiceNow partners, you can count on to bring effective tooling. You can accelerate revenue growth through the opportunities provided by Microsoft Azure Expert MSP Certification.