What is cloud asset management (CAM)?
Cloud Asset Management (CAM), as the name suggests, refers to the practice of tracking and managing any resource that can or does contribute to the delivery of cloud services. Examples of assets include: virtual or physical storage, virtual or physical servers, software licenses, and staff knowledge that may not yet be documented.
Cloud asset management is a nontechnical aspect of cloud service delivery that stems from traditional asset management and aligns with popular IT management frameworks, such as the ITIL service lifecycle. Asset management is an essential aspect of any effective business management plan, that aims at systematically understanding how assets are procured, maintained, upgraded, and disposed of cost-effectively. For native cloud companies, tracking cloud assets is a must, as many of the assets are non-tangible.
While the basic tenets of tracking assets can be done by spreadsheet, this approach is only helpful for the smaller companies, as it is error-prone and can quickly become cumbersome. At the enterprise level, with the sheer number of devices connected to their vast networks, using specialized asset tracking software is essential for managing asset life cycles. A variety of software are available for asset management.
- Asset Performance Management Software — For tracking the performance and extending the life of fixed assets, sometimes delivered as part of a larger package, such as EAM or BI software.
- Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Software — For tracking physical assets in large scale cases, typically including performance and costing capabilities.
- IT Asset Management (ITAM) Software — For documenting IT software and hardware inventory.
- SaaS Operations Management Software — For tracking and managing SaaS products.
- Software Asset Management (SAM) Software — For tracking software licenses.
Asset management in cloud environments
Asset management is highly adaptable for cloud environments. The major cloud providers also provide native frameworks and tools for their platforms.
Google’s Cloud Asset Inventory is designed to give real-time information, pulled from Google Cloud resources and policies, on the current state of your cloud assets throughout the organization. Integrated automation tools can then use this information, or snapshot, to monitor for any security or policy violations and take corrective action if directed. For further analysis, the asset inventory’s metadata history can be exported. Google also plays well with others, by integrating with other Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools organizations can create a unified, comprehensive view of all their resources throughout all environments.
AWS offers a similar set of tools, the AWS Systems Manager Inventory. The AWS SMI collects metadata from assets, and if connected can save it to an Amazon S3 bucket where analysis can reveal their state. AWS promotes this process as a one-click procedure. AWS is customizable, allowing the collection of custom parameters, as well as scheduling collecting items.
As well, and beyond simply creating an inventory, IBM offers their IBM Multicloud Management Platform (MCMP) Cost and Asset Management (CAM) that analyzes costing and performance, continuously informing leadership of wastage and cost savings opportunities, effectively answering, what does it cost to run the business, to provide IT services? What resources and how much are being consumed? Where are the best areas to make trade-offs, or shed unused services? And how can IT align more closely with future goals.
Benefits of cloud asset management
Asset management boils down to tracking and logging company assets, like counting inventory on shelves. But in the cloud, it’s made complicated by the number of physical as well as virtual assets that are being created and utilized in cloud configurations. To alleviate these pains cloud asset management software provides the following benefits.
- Centralized Cloud Inventory — The primary benefit of tracking cloud assets is full visibility of all assets that deliver the cloud service. This allows for accurate life cycle management. For organizations with service level expectations, ensuring that critical service delivery assets don’t bring down the system is key to delivering service levels.
- Cloud and Process Automations — Automations are essential to cloud computing, and so it makes sense to extend these properties into cloud asset management. In fact, automation is also what allows modern cloud inventory to be so efficient. With automations, new assets can be discovered as they are added, and asset costs can be tracked in real-time.
- Security Assurance & Compliance — Inventory visibility is key to security assurance, however, cloud asset management software may need to be integrated alongside, or as a third-party integration. More than simply inventorying assets, software can ensure cloud compliance in and environment increasingly regulated and expanding.
- Reduced Capital and Maintenance Costs — The combination of a centralized cloud inventory, automations, and a higher level insight into asset life cycle coupled with a preventative maintenance strategy helps organizations reduce their capital and maintenance costs.
Cloud asset management best practices
Luckily, asset management software for the cloud is effective. The following are asset management best practices that can further set organizations up for success.
- Seek Operational Excellence — Operational excellence means developing a foundation of observability, automation, and scalability. This can mean setting up automation, monitoring, alerting, logging, cloud support, capacity and quota management, understanding peak traffic times, and promoting a culture of reliability.
- Design System Reliability — Reliability is shared by everyone in the process of developing and delivering services. While no single best practice can fully address system reliability, understanding that reliability is not a goal to achieve but rather a state to maintain can shine light on how to proceed. Reliability does not need a costly 100% uptime, reliability is supported by rapid innovation and development, and reliability is usually a top feature.
- Optimize Costs — Every aspect of the network, and cloud environment should be monitored and watched to determine how to optimize costs. By making costs visible, encouraging cost responsibilities in staff, enabling collaborative optimizations, harboring a culture that seeks innovation over blame, and focusing on business value, companies can optimize their costs with more control and insight.
- Optimize Performance — Performance should be optimized through autoscaling and data processing, using GPUs and TPUs, and accurately identifying apps to be tuned up.
Cloud asset management software
Mentioned above are several types of asset management software, including EAM, ITAM, and SAM software for tracking assets. The features these packages provide for Cloud Asset Management Software can include:
- Audit Management
- Compliance Tracking
- Configuration Management
- Contract/License Management
- Cost Tracking
- Inventory Management
- Maintenance Management
- Procurement Management
- Requisition Management
- Supplier Management
Why is asset management in the cloud important?
Asset management is a basic business process that helps decision makers to reduce costs by tracking and monitoring the performance of company assets. This is a process that companies can extend to their cloud resources, and in fact should. It is estimated that 50 billion devices are now connected to the internet in 2020. But, the staggering number of virtual assets in the cloud can far exceed this. It’s because of this rapidly ballooning of devices, VMs, license, etc. that asset tracking is a necessity.
For organizations, the main aim of asset management is control and visibility in an ever expanding ecosystem of trackable entities. In order to get a 360-degree view of asset life cycles, companies can deploy cloud asset tracking software with automated functionality to discover and catalog new assets, and then follow them through to disposal.
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