Category: Cloud Series

The Cloud has made computing that much easier for companies; they are able to work from home, share files in a single location, and they can sleep easy at night knowing that all their licensing problems are a thing of the past…or are they? Unfortunately, there are some common ways companies become non-compliant in the cloud.

With pay-as-you-go pricing models and easy scalability, it would seem as though there’d be no chance to run up against any trouble in the Cloud. Still, there are a few scenarios that present compliance risks that you should be wary about as you make the transition into the Cloud.

At MetrixData 360, we have helped many of our customers transition into the Cloud smoothly and with as little impact as possible when it comes to their expenses, so let’s look at how compliance is still something to be wary of, even in the Cloud.

Compliance Issue #1: Expecting Vendors to Keep You Compliant

If you are hosting all your products on a vendor’s platform, you’d think that vendor would let you know if you were overspending or if you were using services you are not entitled to.

It’s not for their lack of knowledge – they know exactly what you’re using and how much because your servers are their servers. However, there are services on the Cloud that exist without a cap of any kind.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a great example of this. The product tracks social media mentions and it does not stop once you reach the limit of your mentions, it just keeps going while simply tripling your cost for its tracking efforts —meanwhile, your 20K monthly expense could jump up to 250K if left unattended.

Your software vendor will also not stop you from using services you aren’t entitled to.

For instance, if an administrator were to enable Azure Threat Protection at the domain level, they could do so, and the protection would cover every user in the domain including users that don’t have the proper license to entitle them to this protection.

This type of expectation that organizations govern themselves could leave companies having to pay up tremendous amounts of unforeseen software spend, along with non-compliance fees at their next true-up.

Compliance Issue #2: Using Expired Plans

In the case of some vendors, despite the fact that a license may have expired, its curdled remains are still accessible to their user. The only way a technical barrier is activated to a company is when every license within that organization has expired for that service.

As long as there is still a single active license, then anyone who has an expired license can still access that service, which can leave a company exposed to unexpected fees.

Compliance Issue #3: Mixing Plans

When you purchase a Microsoft 365 Subscription plan, you are signing up for the access to applications and services such as Office, Exchange, and SharePoint. These Subscription plans range from basic (F1) to top of the line and most expensive (E5).

Hidden costs can easily crop up when you mix plans. Features may be accessible to members of your organization who do not have the license to use them, which puts you into dangerous compliance risk territory.

To make matters worse, it is not exactly clear which licenses are needed to use some features. Manual configuration is advised to avoid this compliance risk.

You’ll be asked to buy extra “standalone licenses” for lower-level plans in order to compensate for users accessing high-level suites.

Compliance Issue #4: Underestimating Total Expense

The sheer nature of the pricing metric of Cloud products makes it so that it can be difficult to estimate true cost. It may seem as though two extra dollars a month won’t have that big of an impact, but once it is scaled up to your whole organization, it can leave you having to pay out a large chunk of your software budget.

One client of ours had this exact problem with an unexpected $8,000 spike in their software spend. We tracked the unexpected spending to a desktop belonging to a junior IT team member who had accidentally turned on Blob Storage for his entire company.

In the defense of the junior IT member, there had only been barely a few dollars of difference between the storage applications he had been asked to pick between, but it had cost his company a tremendous amount of unneeded spend.

How to Avoid Becoming Non-Compliant in the Cloud

While the Cloud might not be the balmy risk-free getaway promised, it can still provide your organization with the flexibility it needs to succeed, and it doesn’t have to be a budgeting nightmare if you follow these simple steps:

Get a Handle on your Cloud Solution

The Cloud can be liberation for many companies.

However, as great as it may be, it is important that you are aware of the stumbling blocks that befall companies who head straight to the Cloud thinking it will be the end of their compliance issues, because oftentimes it is not.

Compliance gaps and audits are a massive form of revenue for Microsoft, so despite the apparent transition away from restrictive arrangements that allow for compliance gaps in the first place, you may find yourself butting heads with its Cloud equivalent.

At MetrixData 360, we are more than prepared and capable in helping you achieve your goals in the Cloud. We know how to monitor your usage with our Azure Usage Reporting tool, which can help you solve any of your Azure compliance or spending issues.

For more information, you can check out our Azure Usage Reporting Tool page here.

On your way to the Cloud, you may be confronted with a lot of confusing terms while deciding on how to build your Cloud architecture. Terms like Cloud Native, Cloud Agnostic, and Cloud Enabled are often used seemingly at random.

At MetrixData 360, we have helped many of our clients successfully migrate to the cloud and we want to ensure your migration to the Cloud is successful as well.

We’re going to break down the difference between the three terms and what advantages and disadvantages each of these solutions can bring to your Cloud platform.

But, before you dive head first into the complex definitions of cloud infrastructure, we suggest you watch this video to get warmed up:

Cloud Native

Definition: What is Cloud Native?

Cloud Native is a bit of a loose term that can generally be described as the action of building and running applications that exploit the advantages of the cloud delivery model. Kind of vague, isn’t it? When you sign up for Cloud Native architecture, it’s typically only a matter of selecting a Cloud Provider and building your architecture to stick with that provider exclusively. Cloud Native architecture relies heavily on services tied to the Cloud Provider themselves, such as Azure Monitoring services in Azure or CloudWatch in AWS.

Companies go about establishing Cloud Native platforms by utilizing vendor-specific offerings like AWS’ function-as-a-service and Azure’s globally-distributed database Cosmos DB.

The Pros of Cloud Native

The Cons of Cloud Native

Cloud Native vs. Cloud Enabled Applications

As if the Cloud couldn’t be more confusing, ‘Cloud Native’ is actually a two-fold term which also may be used when referring to applications.

Not to be mistaken with Cloud Enabled applications, Cloud Native applications are ones that are built exclusively for the Cloud; they were born in the Cloud and are deployed and work best in the Cloud.  It is expected that Cloud Native applications will become the norm as time progresses, with 90% of all new apps using Cloud Native structures and an estimated 35% of all production apps being Cloud Native by 2022.  

Cloud Native Solutions are often viewed as the more attractive option since they better harness the full advantages of life in the clouds, they are designed to host multi-tenant instances and they are usually significantly cheaper than Cloud Enabled applications.

While Cloud Native and Cloud Enabled might be used interchangeably at times, they are not always discussing the exact same thing.

Cloud Enabled applications are applications which have been originally made for and in a static environment on-prem and are meant to reside on an in-house server or data center. This piece of legacy enterprise software is then simply tweaked and restructured to be enabled in the Cloud in order to offer its customer’s remotely available and easy management. While they may be similar to their Cloud native counterparts, using a Cloud Enabled application will leave you with limitations on how that application can interact with the full cloud environment, creating issues such as:

Vendors who offer Cloud Enabled applications might try to pass them off as Cloud Native, since Cloud Native solutions are the far more popular option on the market and are considered to be a short-hand for ‘modern applications and infrastructure practices.’

Cloud Agnostic

Definition: What Is Cloud Agnostic?

Being Cloud Agnostic means building your architecture to utilize everything open source technologies and portable components have to offer, this architecture is built to be able to switch providers easily, or even allow for the use of multiple cloud providers simultaneously. Unlike Cloud Native solutions, where you will typically be at the mercy of your Cloud solution provider, Cloud Agnostic gives you the freedom to forge your own path into the clouds.

The Pros of Cloud Agnostic

The Cons of Cloud Agnostic

Getting Help for Your Migration to the Cloud

The Cloud can be a turbulent place, with so many options and muddled terms that it might be easier to stay rooted to your on-prem solution.

Software infrastructures are unique for every company, there’s no one way to do it and the same is true when it comes to building your company’s platform in the Cloud. When deciding what your Cloud platform will look like, it’s important that you know what your options are so you aren’t limited to a solution that might not be best suited your company’s objectives, goals, and budget.

At Metrixdata 360, we understand this complexity and companies desires to pick their own customizable solution, something that we prioritize when helping our clients in their transition. You stay in the driver’s seat and we ensure that your solution is as cost-effective as possible. Together, we’ll get you to where you want to be!

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you smoothly transition into the cloud, then you can check out our Cloud Page.

An Overview on Virtual Machines

Virtual Machines can bring increased mobility and productivity to your business, but before you start filling your screen up with VMs, it is important to first have a strong understanding of what they are and how you can license them. At MetrixData 360, we have worked alongside plenty of organizations looking to maximize the efficiency of their software environment, including the use of their VMs. So today we’ll get into a few of your most pressing questions surrounding virtual machines.

What is a Virtual Machine (VM)?

Just to quickly summarize, a virtual machine (VM) is a virtual environment that behaves separately from the rest of your software environment. It is basically a computer that runs inside another computer, appearing as a window on your screen. It can drastically reduce the time that is required to bring a new server online, going from weeks or months to mere minutes or hours. By booting an operating installer disc (either a virtual or physical one) inside the VM, it is tricked into thinking it is running on a real computer. The actual operating system on your device is called the Host operating system and the operating systems on the VMs are called Guests. Just to keep things from getting too confusing, here is a guide to some terminology from VM Ware.

VMs come with many advantages:

The downside of VMs is that the virtualization process has the tendency to add some lag to the programs you are attempting to run, especially if that program requires copious amounts of storage.

You can run multiple VMs at the same time, with the only limitation being how much storage your hard drive has.

VM Sprawl

The main appeal to virtual machines is how fast they are to bring online and the lack of governance that usually surrounds physical servers within an organization. However, with this agility comes the main concern with VMs: letting them run away from you. This is true for anything that is easy and fast to make, whether that is emails, files, or databases, all of which suffer from sprawl issues. VM sprawl occurs when your company loses track of how many VMs are connected to your software environment. It remains one of the biggest concerns organizations face when it comes to virtual machines. When employees can spin up as many VMs as they like, your company runs the risk of having more than your network can support or than your licenses allow you to have.

There are a few ways one can deal with VM sprawl. You can get a reporting tool to monitor your software environment, however, this only addresses part of the issue, since reporting tools will only give you visibility into the problem. You can track whether it is getting better or worse but there may be very little indication of where the problem is coming from. It is also important to have policies and governance in place that will allow for the cleanup of unused VMs and make it possible to recycle them back into your environment.

Licensing Virtual Machines

Virtual machines are essentially devices that have been built and simply exist on another device. So, in case you were wondering, you absolutely need a license for them. How those VMs are licensed is the real tricky part. Some of the features that can create challenges around licensing VM include:

As you can see, trying to license VMs can be challenging, especially with the minimal fingerprint a VM leaves on its host device and the quick and easy ability to clone a VM. If you license a device to a piece of software, potentially countless VMs could access that software.

The specific rules revolving around licenses differ from vendor to vendor and licensing type to licensing type.

For IBM, for instance, a VM needs to be licensed for any software that it comes into contact with, and it must be licensed as though it were a regular device. You can find more details about the matter in our article.

For Microsoft, licenses that are eligible for license mobility through software can be moved to an Azure environment with default per-minute cost. Windows Server licenses are not eligible for license mobility but if you have Software Assurance, you can utilize the Azure Hybrid Benefits in order to access cheaper per-minute costs.

If you can’t already tell, this can become quite confusing very quickly.

There are general rules you can use to minimize your risk of running up against compliance issues.

Working from Home? Make Sure Your Licensing Allows It!

Still Have Questions?

Virtual Machines can make our lives so much easier and make our work so much more productive, so long as we properly understand them and know how to license them. The last thing you need right now is being forced to either prove which nearly invisible virtual machine did what or simply take the brunt the full blow of an audit penalty, especially when you’re pretty sure you don’t owe as much as the auditors are saying you do. At MetrixData 360, we have helped companies clean up the messiest software environments by getting them started on software asset management and taught them to keep even the most untraceable software in line. Learn more about how you can get started with software asset management.

With so many businesses making the move to the Cloud to benefit from its greater mobility, there has been a lot of conversation around such moves in terms of usefulness, cost, and security.

At MetrixData360, we have heard many conversations about the Cloud, some of them containing only half-truths about the Cloud and its benefits. In this post, we will look at four of the most common myths about moving to the cloud and debunk some of the misconceptions about the benefits of making the move.

1. “Moving to the Cloud is Cheaper than Having Everything On-Premises”

This is not entirely false. It can be cheaper to move to the Cloud compared to keeping everything in house. It can also give your IT budget an ulcer if done incorrectly.

Your instances could be sized improperly, your licenses could not permit you to migrate to the Cloud, or your IT department could spin up as many instances as they want without having a real grasp of how billing for their Cloud environment actually works.

In fact, many companies we’ve come across have had to rethink how they are transitioning to the Cloud halfway through the process, simply because they discovered it was far more costly than they anticipated.

For further details into cost issues when moving to the Cloud, visit our article on 5 Problems When Moving to the Cloud.

2. “I Have to Move Everything to the Cloud”

There’s nothing stopping you from doing this. Many businesses (Netflix comes to mind) have chosen to exist solely on the Cloud. Obviously, though, it probably won’t prove ideal for every company.

Some vendors won’t let you take your licenses to the Cloud, while other vendors will permit it. The Cloud also provides a variety of services that can meet your company’s unique needs. The Private Cloud offers three main services:

After you’ve established what you want, if you’re allowed to do it, and at what cost, you may find that a hybrid deployment where some applications remain on-prem while others are Cloud-based is the right way for your organization to move to the Cloud.

Hybrid profiles are something that many businesses are choosing after they discover a full transition is too costly. A hybrid deployment can offer the business benefits of the Cloud, while providing you with the flexibility required not to blow the IT budget out of the water.

3. “Whether or Not the Cloud is Safer than On-Prem Is a Simple Yes or No Answer”

There has been a heated debate going on for a while now about how safe it is to store your data on the Cloud. Massive breaches in security and outages of power have been known to happen, but these scenarios fail to acknowledge the systems that are set in place to improve security and storage.

It is also important to note that the only real place your data would be 100% safe from malware and hackers would be buried in a tin can in your backyard, like Microsoft did with Github (and even then, I’m sure there’s a hacker somewhere out there with a shovel).

You run the risk of a breach whenever you interact online, regardless of whether you are on-prem or in the Cloud. When you are in the Cloud, the types of security risks you encounter change from the challenges faced when your environment was on-prem. When your environments are on-prem, your biggest threats are:

Meanwhile, when you are in the Cloud, the biggest threats you have to worry about are:

Knowing the type of risks that you are exposed to in the Cloud can make you better prepared to counteract them.

4. “I Have to be Really into Technology to Understand the Cloud”

This may currently be the case, but it doesn’t have to be.

A study conducted by Citrix in 2012 and presented in the Washington Post found that the majority of Americans do not understand what the Cloud is. 51% of participants thought stormy weather could interfere with the Cloud and 54% said they had never used it before, despite the fact that 95% of them had.

The Cloud is the force behind so much of the Internet, from online banking to popular free email services. For something that has been so quietly entrenched in our everyday lives, it’s important to understand at least the basics of how it works.

The quick explanation is that the Cloud is merely a series of large computers, servers, and data centers (the kind that fill massive warehouses) that are set up around the world where anyone can access it and upload data to it. In exchange for hosting data, people can pay rent for the computing space.

Having your IT infrastructure exclusively within your business is like owning your own house in the countryside. You’re in charge of maintenance; it’s more of a chore to get things to and from your property, and you have more space than you probably need, but there is a greater sense of privacy.

Being in the Cloud, on the other hand, is like renting an apartment in the city with albeit limited space, but you have easier access to things and other people. Congratulations, you now have a basic understanding of the Cloud.

More Information on Making the Move to the Cloud

Moving to the Cloud can be a time of uncertainty, especially when you’re not sure if such a massive project will benefit your company. At MetrixData360, we aim to debunk these myths and find a solution that is right for you.

Not being properly aware of the advantages and disadvantages of moving to the Cloud can cost your company huge, unforeseen, and ultimately unnecessary expenses. It is so important that you’re aware of the risks before you migrate to the Cloud.

If you’d like more information about the Cloud and how to best prepare for your Cloud migration, you can click the link below to visit our Cloud Page where, regardless of the platform you choose, MetrixData 360 can help you through this confusing time.

4 Cloud Optimization Best Practices

Are you ready for your Cloud Migration? Moving to the Cloud is an exciting event for any company but it can be a headache if done incorrectly. Throughout our seven years in software asset management business, we’ve seen companies who have had their software costs escalate to staggering numbers during and after their Cloud migration. At Metrixdata360, we want to make sure you get the most out of your software environment, so to make sure your transition is easy, cost-effective, and stays that way as you settle into your new software estate, here are four tips you can implement for you own cloud optimization.

1. Get Ready to Move to the Cloud

Before your company comes to the decision to go to the Cloud, make sure that you are well prepared for the task at hand. According to Microsoft Azure’s How to optimize your cloud investment with Azure Cost Management, make sure you have a clear outline of what problem you aim to solve when heading to the Cloud, and make sure that moving to the Cloud is the best decision for your company.

Get everyone on board with the Cloud move, which includes making sure the Financial and IT departments are on the same page and have systems in place that can account for both cost and visibility. If you have a Software Asset Manager or Team, make sure that they are ready for the transition, as a large part of their job will be moving with the Cloud migration. Estimate how long you want your company to be on the Cloud and find a billing model that can suit your needs (there are short term estates offered by Microsoft Azure for free).

Before the days of the Cloud, companies would have to buy physical on-premise hardware that would come with a fixed amount of space and that remains the mindset of companies as they move to the Cloud. Often, they will overbuy on space in order to accommodate anticipated growth which made sense when you were dealing with a fixed asset.

Cloud, however, works more like a subscription and can be altered to fit your company’s needs on a monthly basis. Does your company have a busy season where you will need more space compared to the rest of the year? Does your company virtually shut down on the weekends? You can arrange to have your Cloud estate reflect such needs easily.

For a more in-depth look at problems your company is exposed to during your move to the Cloud, see our blog post 5 Problems When Moving to the Cloud.

2. Check Your Software Licenses

Many companies head for the Cloud thinking that they can take their software licenses with them and they are not completely wrong. Some publishers let you take their applications to the Cloud, but others distinctly do not and it’s important to know who is who. This is where Cloud optimization begins to shine and show its value.

Think about applications that might carry sensitive information like credit card numbers or patient records and it’s likely that the vendors of those applications will be unwilling to let you take their licensed software to the Cloud for security reasons.

The licensing metric changes as well once you enter the Cloud and it’s typically the case that a license, once moved to the Cloud, will not go as far to cover as many servers as it once did when it was on-premise. This will leave you with a few unlicensed servers suddenly on your hands after the transition is finished. Make sure you take extra care to understand your licenses and if moving to the Cloud is even possible without finding yourself in breach of your contracts or with a staggering compliance gap.

3. Calculate Your Cloud Costs

One thing that is also important to do before you’ve even started the Cloud transition is have a budget set in place. How to Optimize Your Cloud Investment with Azure Cost Management from Microsoft Azure points out that the Azure calculator is one available tool at your disposal that can calculate how much any combination of Azure’s services will cost. With a budget set in place to limit your IT’s spending and you can know where your money is going.

SAM tools have traditionally been an excellent way of tracking your software spending but you must ensure that your SAM tools are equipped to handle Cloud-based data, since many SAM tools struggle to work with something as new as Cloud. With a budget set in place and the right SAM tools that can monitor those changes, you will also be able to detect where you are overspending so that you will be able to re-bundle those resources to where they will actually be useful.

4. Ensure Visibility and Accountability

One of the biggest issues we’ve seen during a company’s Cloud transition is being unable to keep track of assets. Giving Cloud access to your whole IT department to spin up as many instances as they want can leave you with virtual sprawl and instances that are forgotten while they drain your software budget.

Set an infrastructure in place that can regulate who has permission to spin up instances and make sure that projects are completely decommissioned after they have concluded. In addition to monitoring usage, set a well-informed software budget and investigate if prices have unexpectedly spiked beyond your predetermined price.

2 Models for Optimizing Cloud Cost from BMC Blogs offers two types of solutions for IT departments to manage their Cloud estates. The first model depends on the IT department checking their tools daily and from there perform a series of cost saving tasks.

The model asks that IT members express constant awareness of resources, analyze those resources and from there, optimize the company’s spending with the information that they have. The second model offers a cycle that needs to be performed on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. This cycle focuses on aging, idle and inactive material.

If you are prepared for what to expect, moving to the Cloud can be a satisfying experience that can improve the flexibility of your company and better protect your data from being lost. These four practices will get you ready for your Cloud Transition and more importantly, they will make sure that your software budget doesn’t start spiking the moment you hit the Cloud. If you’re ready to improve your Cloud Optimization, continue onto our Learning Center to learn more about the Cloud.

Moving to the Cloud is tremendously useful for (significantly) reducing the number of servers required to run your environment efficiently. Salesforce, in their article Why Move To The Cloud? 10 Benefits Of Cloud Computing Operating, talks about some of the benefits of entering the Cloud which can include greater flexibility, excellent disaster recovery systems, increased collaboration and less money spent on hardware. However, before you get too excited to join the Great Cloud Migration, here are some important things to keep in mind before you make the transition.

Size Matters: Instances are Sized Correctly

In the past, when you wanted to digitize your work, a physical piece of hardware would arrive on-premise with a defined amount of storage to accommodate your license instance storage requirements.
If your operations only required 200 GB per server, it would then be a smart investment to purchase servers that offered 500 GB just in case your organization grew and you needed more storage as business boomed.

Purchasing storage in that manner made sense when you were dealing with a fixed, physical asset. Now, as organizations migrate to the Cloud, we are still seeing the tendency for purchasing more space than what is actually required in anticipation of future growth.

The Cloud isn’t a physical, fixed asset that you own with storage limitations attached to a piece of hardware. Welcome to a subscription-style storage solution with an a la carte menu that can be augmented or adjusted as needed – whenever it’s needed. If organizations only require 200 GB of space for nine months of the year, then get what you need for as long it’s needed and certainly hold off purchasing more than required in advance!

Assuming You Can Bring Your Own Licenses To The Cloud (BYOL)

If you assume you can bring your own licenses, then you are…not exactly wrong. For some software publishers, their contracts do allow you to move licenses from on-premise to the Cloud – but not always on a 1 to 1 instance basis. Other software publishers do not allow for license use rights to be transferred from on-premise to the Cloud – therefore putting you at risk of being in a non-compliance position with that vendor for the remainder of your contract term.

It is very important to do your due diligence in understanding your contract permissions and restrictions and plan the timing of a Cloud migration strategy accordingly. Not all vendors and products can move at the same time. Consider any applications that might carry sensitive data like patient records or customer credit card information, it is highly unlikely the publisher of that software will let you take that information anywhere near the Cloud. Such an act would prove a huge liability to you as well as to them since the Cloud has been known to have massive breaches in security.

For some publishers, you need to purchase specific Cloud licenses for a piece of software, and for others (to make things even more confusing) they offer a hybrid use right. There are also vendors like Microsoft, who will offer you the right to use their on-premise and SA licenses on their specific Cloud (Azure is one of Microsoft’s).

Service Provider Licensing Agreements are their own battle entirely. Service Provider Licensing Agreements permit a third-party vendor to provide the software to clients as a service. SPLAs usually acts as a monthly service provider and is flexible on a monthly basis. The problem is that these resellers are now also offering Cloud servers, but you will be on the liability-hook for anything that is running in your Cloud space.

Translation Error: Not Understanding How Your Licenses Will Change When Moving To The Cloud

When moving to the Cloud, many companies think that their licenses that they are currently using on-premise will seamlessly cover them for use in the Cloud. If you have 20 servers, you should be allowed that same amount of space on the Cloud, right? However, not all licenses are allowed to be used in the Cloud, so it’s important that you review your contracts and the use rights of all products you move to the Cloud to understand what you can and cannot do.

Otherwise, as you transition to the Cloud, you’ll come across a different licensing metric that will suddenly leave you with a few unlicensed servers or, even worse, in complete violation of the vendors licensing rules.

Let’s take Microsoft’s Azure Hybrid Benefits (AHB) as an example. AHB gives you some rights to use your licenses up in the Cloud, so purchasing it should mean that moving to the Cloud is made simple, but it’s not. You may be licensing your on-premise VMWare Servers with Windows DataCenter, and this would allow you to have an unlimited number of Virtual Windows Servers (VMs) on that single VMWare server.

However, if you have 20 VMs on the server, it might be easy to assume you can move all 20 VMs to Azure without paying for Windows Server Licenses since you have unlimited virtualization rights but this will leave you open for a big surprise. The truth is that the AHB only allows you to cover up to 2 VMS with the licenses that you are using to cover 20 VMs, leaving 18 VMs of Windows exposed to a license compliance gap.

Not Tracking Who Is Installing Software

Companies moving to the cloud often give their IT and development departments the ability to set up as many Cloud instances as they believe they may require, making it difficult to track who is doing what. Without any sort of administrative oversight, the potential to become exposed to disorganization can create a lot of unnecessary sprawl and forgotten instances left plugged into your environment that will be draining your budget quietly in the corner. In our many years of experience, we were once approached by a client whose software bills had spiked mysteriously seemingly overnight.

After doing our research, we traced the spending back to a single server belonging to a junior IT assistant. The junior IT resource, with a single click of a button, had accidentally turned on an unnecessary storage application that was now collecting data from the entire company. When the assistant had turned the storage app on, he had done so thinking that the product cost a little over a dollar a minute to run. Scaled up to the whole company though, that was an additional $4,000 a month, all because no one was monitoring what was being activated in the Cloud.

To make matters worse, according to Timothy Morrow from Carnegie Mellon University, the deletion of data is difficult to monitor on the Cloud. Once deleted, the process to ensure that it is completely removed and fully inactive varies from provider to provider. Make sure that whenever a project is set up in the Cloud, you have a system in place that can properly track it so that you can ensure it has been decommissioned once the project has concluded.

Not Monitoring Usage Regularly

This is another byproduct of not having any sort of administrative oversight around Cloud usage. If instances are established with no oversight they could be left running unknowingly. It’s important that you monitor the activities that occur in your space in the Cloud, that goes for usage as well as installation. Your financial department will be unable to calculate down to the number where and how all the organization’s money is being spent. They can only see the lump sum amounts that can be investigated if something is truly amiss. In any operation’s budget, Cloud expenses can come across as small expenses and can be easily overlooked until they expand into a big spending problem.

Potentially, the task of monitoring and authorizing installation use in the Cloud could be delegated to your Software Asset Manager. As companies are steadily picking up and moving their hardware to the Cloud, the same people that have to manage your software assets on-premise are going to have to learn to do the same on the Cloud. That way you can be sure you are only paying for what is being used.

While it may seem like everyone is heading for the Cloud, it is important to put proper planning/sizing and environment need analysis in advance of making the move. At Metrixdata360, we are quite familiar with these challenges your business will face as you move into the Cloud and as such, we have developed SAM tools that can help you counteract these challenges. We have a tool-set that can monitor your environment constantly to track a timeline of your usage so that you can see exactly where and when your money is being spent. Our main goal is to save you money and control your expenses.

For more information about our SAM services and how we can help you through your Cloud transition, click here.