The debate between public cloud vs. data center has been going on for years, but is just now reaching its peak. Many organizations will undoubtedly continue to leverage their data centers for a long time even if they adopt the public cloud for some workloads. Why? Governance, regulations, investments in existing technology, and inertia are the major reasons. However, this should not stop them from becoming leaner and driving greater cost efficiencies, while delivering great value.
Companies should adopt new multi-cloud governance platforms to gain visibility, control and to optimize their environment. The CloudHealth platform provides governance policies that enable you to save time, reduce cost, increase utilization and rightsize your environment. Read on to learn the three benefits of leveraging policies and governance within your data center.
1. Reducing Your Data Center Costs
Many customers that I’ve spoken with mention that they don’t have a good handle on spending, trending and forecasting for data center resources. They might know how much they have spent historically on acquiring hardware, but cannot plan well for the new workloads or for operational costs. Also, they do not have a good understanding of which business unit is consuming what resources, which makes chargeback or showback a near-impossible task. It’s difficult for them to control the costs proactively using their existing/ homegrown platforms.
With CloudHealth’s powerful policies you can control spending proactively. You can set policies to solve for various use-cases like identifying when resource cost or usage increases rapidly. These powerful policies are not only helpful in controlling spend but also in changing user behavior.
2. Increasing Resource Utilization and Density
Even as the industry has shifted to software-defined and highly virtualized infrastructure, over-provisioning and under-utilization still plagues many enterprise data center environments. This can be for various reasons: long provisioning lead times, lack of transparency, user behavior, etc. can lead to teams requesting more capacity than they require. The under-utilized resources not only drive up hardware procurement costs, but also drive up overhead like cooling cost, management, and security.
With CloudHealth, you gain complete visibility into your environment and drill down to a granular level: VM, application or logical groupings. Customers can use policies to identify under-utilized resources. As can be seen below, a policy can identify resources within specific data centers that are less than 60% utilized across CPU and memory for 7 days. If this condition is found to be true, an email is triggered to notify the IT Admin so they take an appropriate action.
3. Identifying Untagged Assets
Untagged assets are very common in a data center environment that is growing rapidly. This can lead to resources that can’t be aligned to any business group for accountability. It becomes critical that while controlling your data center costs you identify these untagged assets first! So that you don’t sacrifice where you should not.
With just a few clicks in the platform you can keep a tab on all your assets including the untagged assets. To improve productivity, you can schedule policies that check for these untagged assets on a daily/ weekly basis and either spin them down or reallocate them. Following policy snapshot helps you understand how easy it is to identify untagged assets and notify an IT Admin for quick action.
Using policies and governance can help you manage a large and complex data center environment while still getting a good night’s sleep. Thus, policies and governance can help you automate alerting so that you can focus on more strategic activities.
