Can your organization survive without digital transformation? Of course not. And any organization with a digital transformation strategy almost always includes the cloud.
No wonder 94% of all companies worldwide use cloud computing in their operations. And 97% of IT leaders are planning to expand their cloud systems.
But with increasing organizations adopting cloud and many choosing multiple cloud providers (36%) or hybrid clouds (39%), monitoring all your cloud assets becomes a hassle.
For starters, different cloud platforms have their own tools, which may not be compatible with each other and could lead to fragmented data and silos.
Without complete visibility into your infrastructure, applications, and licenses, you cannot track the usage and cost of your cloud assets, manage compliance, or ensure optimal cloud usage. Thus, cloud asset management is crucial for successful digital transformation.
This guide explores what cloud asset management is, key challenges, and best practices for optimizing cloud resources.
Cloud asset management tracks and manages all cloud resources (VMs, databases, etc.) for efficient cloud service delivery.
It’s essential for digital transformation, cost control, security, and compliance in increasingly complex cloud environments.
Key challenges include a lack of cloud governance and compliance risks, limited visibility in multi-cloud and hybrid setups, rising cloud costs and budget overruns, cloud migration and legacy integration issues, and more.
Potential solutions are implementing strong governance policies, utilizing comprehensive cloud management solutions, optimizing cloud spending and resource utilization, strengthening security with Zero Trust and IAM, and more.
Maintaining a centralized asset inventory, prioritizing cost management and optimization, enhancing security posture, and implementing cloud orchestration can help you make the most out of this strategy.
Deploy tools for cost optimization (AWS Cost Explorer, Microsoft Cost Management, Google Cloud Billing), cloud governance (Azure Policy, AWS Config, Google Cloud Asset Inventory), and security & compliance (Prisma Cloud, Check Point CloudGuard).
Cloud asset management (CAM) is the practice of tracking and managing every cloud or digital resource or asset (virtual machine, database, storage bucket) that contributes to the smooth functioning and delivery of your cloud services.
This usually involves planning and acquiring cloud assets, optimizing their use, controlling the costs and licensing, tackling regulatory and compliance issues, and finally moving out of cloud environments or decommissioning the assets.
Key aspects (scope) of cloud asset management typically include:
Resource Optimization
Asset and Visibility Control
Cost Management
Security and Compliance
Integration and Automation
Lifecycle Management
Performance Monitoring
Cloud asset management is only part of the equation. To effectively optimize your IT spending, improve security, and streamline operations, you also need visibility into your on-premises hardware—such as laptops, desktops, and other physical devices across your organization.
An IT asset management platform addresses this need. Workwize helps bridge this gap by automating the full lifecycle of IT hardware—from procurement and deployment to maintenance, repairs, retrieval, and disposal—simplifying the entire asset management process.
That’s where an IT asset management (ITAM) solution comes in. Workwize seamlessly fills that gap by automating the entire IT hardware lifecycle from procurement, deployment, repairs, and maintenance to retrieval and disposal, enabling streamlined IT asset management.
Cloud asset management is crucial for every business planning to or has already migrated to the cloud. However, there are some challenges associated with effectively managing cloud assets, including:
Challenge:
One of the primary challenges IT teams experience when implementing cloud asset management practices is a lack of governance, i.e., lppropriate policies, monitoring odherence through audits, and evaluating the impact of objectives and outcomes.
According to a report by Cybersecurity Insiders, 41% of the respondents claim the absence of data governance in cloud integrations.
And this lack of governance often leads to security breaches, data loss, cost overruns, duplication, penalties for violating data privacy regulations.
Solution
Microsoft recommends 5 disciplines for cloud governance that help organizations set appropriate policies regarding cloud assets:
Source: Microsoft
Cost Management: Create policies or best practices for monitoring and controlling cloud spending.
Security Baseline. Create security baselines based on your organization’s requirements and enforce them across the network and asset configurations.
Identity Baseline. Define authentication and authorization requirements across all cloud adoption efforts.
Resource Consistency. Create policies that ensure all cloud resources are configured to manage risks associated with onboarding, drift, recovery, and discoverability.
Deployment Acceleration: Create policies whether automated or manual to enable efficient, reliable, and secure deployment of cloud environments.
Challenge:
Tracking cloud assets is relatively easier for organizations dealing with a single cloud service provider.
However gaining comprehensive visibility of the entire infrastructure becomes complex when there’s a mix of on-premises systems and multi-cloud services, because each platform, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, comes with its own management tools, security protocols, and APIs.
Solution:
This calls for a comprehensive cloud asset management solution that:
Spans multiple environments, offering you complete visibility
Discovers assets across multiple cloud service providers (CSPs)
Provides up-to-date information that supports service ITSM activities like problem management, incident management, and deployment management.
Challenge:
A Gartner survey predicted that 80% of companies globally would overrun their cloud infrastructure budgets because of a lack of cloud usage optimization. G2 states 49% of businesses find it hard to keep cloud costs under control.
This typically happens because of the following reasons:
Ungoverned Costs: organizations don't know what they are spending money on.
Unanticipated Usage: more and more cloud projects start to show up, leading to unexpected usage and, thus, costs.
Not Using Commitments: Companies fail to commit to a set period with a particular vendor and avail of discounts as they cannot predict usage, leading to high costs.
Dev/test Waste: overprovisioning resources, and failure to turn off the usage of unutilized resources when no one is working
Too Much Production Headroom: not implementing autoscaling for apps or overestimating production headroom for apps.
Wrong-Sizing Production: production environments have more resources than they usually need. And this can add to the costs as you may have to pay for the entire thing at the end of the month.
Suboptimal Design and Implementation: poor architecture, design, or code that consumes more resources than required
Solution:
Clearly define your requirements and compare them before deciding.
Understand the scaling of demand over time.
Analyze and refine solution designs and optimize code for increased cloud efficiency.
Align the subscriptions of your cloud tools with release or deployment schedules to prevent cloud wastage.
Scrutinize licensing structures and discount offers to identify the most affordable option.
Challenge:
Migrating from an inherently complex legacy system to a cloud platform can be challenging as the CSP may not support lift-and-shift migration. And the organization may be reluctant to move to the cloud, because there’s a risk of disrupting mission-critical processes.
Here’s a Reddit discussion wherein a user lists lift and shift as one of the challenges they faced when migrating to the cloud:
Source: Reddit
If an organization tries to migrate to the cloud without assessing the risks or a well-thought migration strategy, it might be unable to combine the systems’ data with modern cloud apps, resulting in inefficiencies.
Solution:
Create a migration strategy that considers the pros and cons of different options, i.e., rearchitecting or lift-and-shift migration.
Train existing IT resources and make them proficient in the cloud.
Create a configuration management approach where you document and understand each part of your business services and how they work together. This helps you ensure nothing is impacted when you move your systems to the cloud.
Make sure the data is compliant with data retention policies before initiating migration. Conducting pre-migration tests can help you identify any points of failure or dependencies.
Conduct due diligence to make sure your organization and the vendor understand the terms correctly.
Challenge:
Purchasing SaaS based cloud solutions is easier. All you have to do is enter the corporate credit card information and make the purchase, without following standard IT procurement or approval processes, as these purchases are categorized under operational expenses. But looking at it from a security standpoint, it’s shadow IT.
Here’s what a Systems Infrastructure Engineer has to say about shadow IT challenges related to SaaS products:
Source: Reddit
Additionally, theft of super user credentials and bypassing authorized access to address issues or execute tasks are other common security challenges organizations face.
Solutions:
Implement:
Detailed operational procedures and security policies. Integrate cloud service provider (CSP) access management tools and test for non-standard access or activity.
The Zero Trust security model, wherein all entities are untrusted by default, least privilege access is enforced, and comprehensive security monitoring is implemented.
DevSecOps, wherein security is a part of every process and not an afterthought.
Challenge:
It’s common for organizations to outsource some of their software or computing infrastructure to a cloud service provider. However, sometimes companies find themselves locked-in with the vendor.
For instance, once you have outsourced to a cloud service provider, switching to another is daunting as it involves massive logistical challenges (eg, moving entire databases). And the 3rd party software might be so deeply integrated into your organization that making any changes would risk disrupting the business-critical processes.
Now, imagine the CSP lowers the quality of services, changes the offerings, or increases the pricing. Because of the complexities of moving to a new vendor, you’ll be stuck with your existing one. That’s vendor lock-in.
Here’s a reddit discussion on vendor lock-in:
Source: Reddit
Solutions:
Evaluate cloud services carefully: Research the cloud vendor before making a commitment
Smooth data movement: Make sure the data is portable or easily moved from one environment to another.
Backups: Keep internal backups to facilitate hosting the data elsewhere.
Multi-cloud or hybrid cloud strategy: outsource operations to multiple cloud service providers and reduce dependence on a single vendor. Use hybrid cloud environments to ensure you remain in direct control.
Challenge:
Managing cloud assets can be challenging without cloud orchestration or leveraging automation tools and can lead to:
Inconsistent configurations across cloud assets
Slower response because of manual management.
Higher risk of human errors as provisioning, scaling, and monitoring are done manually.
Solution:
Cloud orchestration, as VMware defines it, is the process of automating tasks required to manage connections and operations of workloads on private and public clouds.
When you onboard cloud assets through orchestration, you can save time and standardize asset configurations. Orchestration or automation allows you to deploy networking, storage, and multiple computing resources faster.
Take the Kubernetes Engine, for example. It determines where to run Google Cloud containers, tracks their health, and manages the complete lifecycle of VM instances.
Pro Tip: For a truly holistic approach, try integrating a solution like Workwize that automates every process of the IT hardware lifecycle from asset procurement, deployment, and management to retrieval and disposal. This will help you further reduce manual errors, improve response time and save even more time.
Challenge:
Because of the inherently dynamic and complex nature of the cloud environment and assets spread across multiple locations and providers, ensuring security and creating reliable backup routines and disaster recovery plans can become challenging.
Consequently, the organization becomes more vulnerable to data breaches. If there’s a disruption, the organization could face prolonged downtime and be unable to recover from the outage.
No wonder 27% of businesses experienced a public cloud security incident in 2024 - a 10% increase from the previous year.
Solution
Organizations must integrate security protocols, automated backup systems, and well-defined recovery plans to protect the cloud assets and ensure business continuity.
Challenge:
While cloud computing is efficient, it requires significant electricity, mainly for powering infrastructure and cooling systems. One of the most crucial components of cloud computing, data centers, need massive amounts of water for cooling purposes.
For instance, Google’s data centers consume around 4.3 billion gallons of water per year.
If you fail to manage your cloud assets appropriately and optimize their usage and performance, you’d not only experience increased costs but leave a larger carbon footprint. Solution:
Optimize your workload and overall resource utilization to minimize waste.
Opt for green cloud solutions. According to Accenture, moving from on-premises to cloud can reduce energy consumption by 65% and carbon emissions by 84%.
Via Google Cloud
Implement a Cloud Asset Inventory System: Create a centralized inventory of all cloud assets, including storage, computing resources, network components, and applications. This level of visibility is essential for effective cloud asset management and optimization.
Cost Management and Optimization: Track every aspect of the network and cloud environment using AI-powered cloud monitoring tools and identify areas where you can optimize costs. Also, try to create a culture that focuses on delivering business value and innovation over playing the blame game.
Strengthen your Security Posture: Implement Zero Trust policies and Identity Access Management solutions. ZTP helps ensure users get only the necessary permissions to perform the tasks and IAM solutions continuously verify users accessing cloud resources.
Implement Orchestration: Use automation platforms to automate processes like cloud provisioning, monitoring, scaling, etc, to reduce manual intervention and operational overhead.
Compliance: Make sure your cloud operations comply with the industry regulations to avoid legal or financial repercussions.
Here are some cloud asset management tools and technologies to make your job easier:
Cloud Governance Solutions
Via AWS
Microsoft Azure Policy: Azure Policy is a service that helps you create, assign, and manage policies to enforce rules over your Azure resources. Using Azure Policy, you can ensure the cloud environments adhere to the organizational standards and regulatory compliance.
AWS Config: AWS config is a tool that helps you assess, audit, and evaluate configurations and relations of your AWS assets or resources.
Google Cloud Asset Inventory: Google Cloud Asset Inventory is a global metadata inventory service that allows you to view, search, export, monitor, and analyze your Google Cloud asset metadata.
Cost Optimization Tools
Via Microsoft
AWS Cost Explorer: AWS Cost Explorer tool helps you visualize, understand, and manage your AWS costs and usage of resources over time.
Microsoft Cost Management: Microsoft Cost Management allows you to manage your Azure cloud investments. You can track usage, monitor expenses, identify cost anomalies, and forecast expenditures.
Google Cloud Billing: Cloud Billing is a set of tools to help you track and understand your Google Cloud spending, pay your bills and optimize costs.
Workwize: Workwize is an IT asset management solution that helps you track and manage IT assets in real-time, enabling you to optimize resource utilization and thus cut costs.
Via Prisma Cloud
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools such as:
Prisma Cloud: Prisma Cloud offers comprehensive visibility and threat detection to mitigate risks and secure your workloads in a heterogeneous environment (hybrid and multi-cloud.) It can help you predict, prevent, detect, and respond to security and compliance risks automatically.
Check Point CloudGuard: Check Point Cloudguard is a comprehensive cloud security platform that allows you to prevent threats and prioritize risks in the cloud across your applications, network and workloads.
According to the HashiCorp-Forrester report, 94% of respondents are overspending in the cloud. Over a thousand decision makers in the survey indicated that this overspending resulted from over-provisioned cloud resources and lack of utilization.
However, you can avoid overprovisioning cloud resources and keep your cloud spending in check by implementing the best practices for cloud asset management, as stated in this article.
Pro Tip: While managing cloud assets, ensure you don’t ignore your IT hardware assets. IT assets like the computers, laptops, and other devices they use must also be efficiently managed across the asset lifecycle from procurement to disposal.
And guess what? Workwize can help. We’re a global IT hardware solution that allows you to automate asset procurement, deployment, management, retrieval, and disposal.
Zero touch onboardings and offboardings and minimal human intervention. Real-time visibility over your assets to help you maintain security and compliance and ensure all assets are utilized properly.
Complement your cloud asset management strategy with Workwize and gain control over your cloud and IT assets. Book a free demo now!