In 2020, we released over 135 product updates to the CloudHealth portfolio, including support for additional clouds, enhancements for partners, and updates to key functional areas—cloud financial management, operations, and security and compliance.
Needless to say, 2020 is a year that will not be forgotten. It was a year full of challenges both professionally and personally for our customers, partners, and employees. Like other businesses, we had to adjust to remote working but I’m pleased to share that it did not impact our rate of innovation.
This year we released over 135 product updates across our portfolio, consisting of the CloudHealth Platform and CloudHealth Secure State, outperforming our number of 100 updates from last year. These updates included enhancements for partners, support for additional clouds, and updates to key functional areas—cloud financial management, operations, and security and compliance.
Let’s break down the most notable releases across the CloudHealth portfolio.
CloudHealth Platform
A leader in multi-cloud management, the CloudHealth platform helps organizations drive accountability, improve cross-organizational collaboration, and optimize costs through consolidated visibility and reporting across your entire cloud environment. This year we released functionality to enhance cost visibility and control as we continue to support multi-cloud environments.
FlexReports
CloudHealth FlexReports give you greater control with reporting that is fully customizable in nature and improves collaboration across teams. You can easily build reports across various dimensions to perform more granular analysis on cloud cost, usage, and asset data. You will also have access to an API-backed set of capabilities to define and export reports formatted to suit your specific needs. Learn more about CloudHealth FlexReports.
FlexOrgs
CloudHealth FlexOrgs represent the first major release to empower enterprise cloud management at scale. This new capability enables you to build CloudHealth organizations that closely reflect your business. With FlexOrgs, you can create and delegate sub-organizations via API, with each sub-organization inheriting permissions from the parent org. Now, every organization can work independently with decentralized management, while maintaining centralized visibility and control. Learn more about CloudHealth FlexOrgs.
AWS Savings Plans Recommendations
Last year we announced support for AWS Savings Plans in our Cost History and Usage Reports. This year we expanded our support to include a recommendation engine that will help you drive better business outcomes throughout the entire lifecycle of Savings Plans management. You can now explore which Compute Savings Plan is right for your business and purchase directly from the CloudHealth platform. Learn more about AWS Savings Plans Recommendations.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
In September we announced the general availability of CloudHealth for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), further extending our multi-cloud support. At the request of our customers, we now provide visibility into the cost and usage of OCI resources. You can view historic resource usage across teams, create cloud usage and cost forecasts, and provide showback for cost management among all cloud users. Learn more about our support for OCI.
Microsoft Modern Commerce
Microsoft announced a new commerce experience for Azure last fall, referred to as Modern Commerce. For CloudHealth, Modern Commerce created a new billing construct in Azure, with a hierarchy of billing resources such as Billing Profiles, Billing Accounts, and Invoice sections. As a result, we updated the platform to support this new structure, so we can continue supporting our Microsoft Azure partners and customers. Learn more about Modern Commerce.
CloudHealth Secure State
CloudHealth Secure State is an intelligent multi-cloud security and compliance monitoring platform that helps your organization reduce risk and protect millions of cloud resources by remediating security violations and scaling best practices at cloud speed. In 2019, we expanded our portfolio to include CloudHealth Secure State, and in 2020 we delivered critical functionality to help further strengthen your cloud security posture.
Multi-cloud remediation
CloudHealth Secure State released a secure remediation approach to help you automate actions across AWS and Azure without requiring write access to your cloud environments within the SaaS monitoring service. As part of this release, you can leverage a library of predefined remediation jobs, define new custom jobs, or import jobs shared by other security experts in the CloudHealth Secure State open-source remediation community. Once enabled, you can automatically click to remediate a misconfiguration that caused a security violation or build guardrails that proactively prevent security mistakes from happening. Auto-remediation is a great way to reduce the number of new findings that are introduced into your cloud environment. Learn more about multi-cloud remediation.
Google Cloud Support
In the fall we added support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), enabling you to extend security visibility and manage risk consistently across the three leading public cloud providers. This release introduced real-time security and compliance monitoring and interconnected risk visualization, alongside support for the CIS GCP Foundations Benchmark v1.1.0 framework. Learn more about CloudHealth Secure State’s Google Cloud support.
Entity Data Service
The Entity Data Service (EDS) is a major infrastructure enhancement to the CloudHealth Secure State platform, which enables enhanced visibility and accelerated support for additional cloud services. The EDS is a new base component of the platform that exposes advanced query capabilities via API and optimizes how the service stores your cloud configuration data. Continuing to drive our API-first approach, you can now search for resources that could be potentially exposed or understand the blast radius of security incidents using EDS APIs. Learn more about the Entity Data Service APIs.
Projects
CloudHealth Secure State Projects help you build a collaborative and scalable cloud security program to protect your cloud environment. This release enables you to define groupings of cloud accounts and provide role-based access control to account owners. Central security teams can now define baseline security and compliance controls for the entire organization while inviting individual service owners to monitor violations, request rule suppressions, and create reports and integrations at a project level. Learn more about CloudHealth Secure State Projects.
Compliance management and custom frameworks
CloudHealth Secure State helps you continuously assess and improve compliance benchmarked against industry standards, such as CIS, PCI, NIST 800-171, HIPAA, and SOC2. Now, you can take your cloud security journey a step further by creating custom compliance frameworks, which allow you to create standards that align with your company’s unique requirements. This release helps you achieve a new level of precision by grouping cloud security rules from different sources. Learn more about compliance management and custom frameworks.
Driving customer and partner success
With the ever-changing nature of the cloud and the unexpected challenges of this year, our commitment to customer and partner success has never been greater. We have continued with our regular newsletter communications, delivered numerous Power of the Platform training sessions, and continued to certify and enable our users. We also introduced two key initiatives to help you optimize your business: Optimization Desk and Customer Health Analytics.
Optimization Desk
This year we introduced a new Optimization Desk specifically to help our customers who are reacting to the sudden shift in market dynamics. As part of the service, we create a no-cost report card based on CloudHealth’s executive business review artifacts and Optimization Playbook. So far, we’ve seen dozens of our customers embrace our recommendations and move ahead with detailed plans to optimize their cloud financial management processes. Learn more about the CloudHealth Optimization Desk.
Partner Customer Health Analytics
As part of our world-class partner success service, we have introduced Customer Health Analytics to add even more value to your CloudHealth investment. Customer Health Analytics provides CloudHealth partners with a detailed analysis of the health of their cloud business and their customers’ cloud environment, benchmarked against their peers. More than just data or a report, Customer Health Analytics combines detailed data and a proven methodology for cloud Managed Service Providers to measure the health of their customer base. Learn more about Customer Health Analytics.
In the new year, the CloudHealth team will continue our focus on driving positive business outcomes for our customers and partners. We’re looking forward to delivering even more product enhancements and innovative product releases to support your cloud management and security needs.
You can follow our 2021 updates on the CloudHealth blog, and also reach out to our team directly with any questions.
