2021 was a year of adaptation – from remote to hybrid working models, virtual and in-person conferences, and VMware becoming a standalone company once more! The CloudHealth and CloudHealth Secure State teams are excited about these changes and ready to continue our success into the new year.
Looking back at the past 12 months, we have accomplished a total of 170+ product updates across the CloudHealth by VMware Suite, outperforming last year’s 135 updates. Here are some of the highlights:
CloudHealth
Custom Line Items
The CloudHealth team has developed an enhanced cloud financial management capability, CloudHealth Custom Line Items, to help organizations capture an accurate multi-cloud total cost of ownership. The Custom Line Items feature provides an enriched user experience and API capability that allows users to manipulate costs directly in the CloudHealth platform to perform chargeback and showback. This includes the capability to add and manage additional charges/credits with a one-time or recurring frequency as well as remove costs such as Tax, VAT, Support, etc. for better financial control.
Learn more about CloudHealth Custom Line Items.
vRealize Operations Integration for CloudHealth
Teams from VMware vRealize Operations and CloudHealth have worked together to create a bi-directional approach for multi-cloud management. In July, we announced the release of the VMware vRealize® Operations Integration™ for CloudHealth® which collects cost, usage, and asset inventory for vSphere from vRealize Operations and ingests it into CloudHealth. This enhancement allows all your vCenter accounts to be automatically synchronized with CloudHealth and provides users across an organization to see the entire cloud ecosystem in one place, with access to the data they need in the context and platform most relevant to them.
Read more about the vRealize Operations Integration for CloudHealth.
Kubernetes Overview Report
Kubernetes cost and usage visibility is critical for organizations when allocating costs for chargeback or showback reporting, or identifying cost or usage spikes in your environment. We have brought together these essential reports in the platform to a central location: the Kubernetes Overview Report. The Kubernetes Overview Report brings several key reports into a centralized dashboard enabling you to understand the cost and usage trends in aggregate, per cluster and namespace.
Learn more about how to optimize your Kubernetes clusters and pods for cost savings.
VMware Cloud on AWS
In November, the CloudHealth team announced the public beta of VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS Support. CloudHealth provides visibility into VMC on AWS cost and usage so you can view all your public and hybrid cloud costs in a single platform. Features such as Cost History Reports, Billing Period Reports, Usage Reports, and more are available in this release. Be on the lookout for more enhancements!
Read more about Cloud FinOps for Native AWS and VMC on AWS.
CloudHealth Partner Platform
Partner Billing Support for Azure Enterprise Agreements
The CloudHealth team was excited to announce the availability of partner billing support for Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements (EAs) in January 2021. This feature allows you to configure an EA within the partner tenant and then assign a subset of the subscriptions to customer tenants. Most importantly, CloudHealth will only report on the costs associated with the subscriptions assigned to the customer tenant. In addition to being able to assign the subscriptions, you’ll also be able to create billing rules at a per subscription basis. This way, you’ll be able to specify at a more granular level which subscriptions the rules should be applied to.
Learn more about the CloudHealth Partner Platform.
Partner Generated Billing Support for Google Cloud Platform
The availability of support for Partner Generated Billing (PGB) for Google Cloud Platform was highly anticipated from the CloudHealth team. With this expanded support, partners are able to configure their master billing account in their partner tenant and assign corresponding billing accounts to their customer tenants. Partner generated billing further enables partners to generate monthly invoices for each of their customers with the inclusion of billing rules to markup or markdown costs for services which their customers are consuming. This enhancement allows partners to have a single pane view to all their AWS, Azure, and GCP customers along with their costs for corresponding cloud usage.
Read more about Partner Generated Billing for Google Cloud Platform.
CloudHealth Secure State
Interconnected Kubernetes Security Posture Management
CloudHealth Secure State announced the general availability of interconnected Kubernetes Security Posture Management (KSPM) for cloud managed services in December 2021. This solution enables you to gain visibility of Kubernetes resources running in the cluster and understand how it’s connected to your public cloud resources. Secure State provides continuous, real-time security monitoring based on CIS benchmark controls from AWS EKS v1.0.1, Azure AKS v1.0.0, and GCP GKE v1.1.0 along with rules developed by our research team that span cloud and Kubernetes. In total, there are 200 Secure State native rules for Kubernetes across the three public cloud environments – AWS, Azure and GCP.
Alerts and Integrations
The CloudHealth Secure State Alerts and Integrations service builds on previous experience with features that enable customers to centralize security findings from third-party sources on CloudHealth Secure State or integrate CloudHealth Secure State into their existing collaboration and communication tools. This release includes additional enhancements allowing you to receive email alerts in real-time or to schedule your alerts to be delivered in a summary format. You can also programmatically set up the alerts and integration service via APIs to automate and integrate with your security operation tools.
Learn more about efficiently scaling security in the public cloud.
Azure Government Subscription Support
We are excited to extend our real-time visibility and detection capabilities to Azure Government environments. You can now onboard an Azure Government subscription to CloudHealth Secure State. You can do this by setting your “Account Type” as “Government” when onboarding your subscription.
Explore Search
The next generation of Explore Search functionality- a real-time, search and investigation engine within CloudHealth Secure State which allows you to quickly find resources, understand relationships, and visualize security and compliance risk -is here! It enables additional scenarios like tag management, orphaned objects discovery, and certificate expiration monitoring. The new Explore Search introduces a few new search types in addition to the already familiar relationship search such as list search, text search, aggregation search, and inverted relationship search. This also includes multi-account search for non-relationship search types and a handy first-time experience guide with sample queries.
Learn more about Explore Search.
Suppressions
Suppressions allows account owners to identify and request exceptions to enabled rules on the CloudHealth Secure State platform. Approved Suppression excludes findings from views and reports, while giving users the ability to track the exceptions. We made improvements to Suppressions, which will help security teams better collaborate with account owners and engineering teams. Some of the new capabilities introduced are bulk suppression requests and bulk disposition of suppressions, suppression policies that enable automatic suppression for findings based on criteria like accounts, rules, regions, environments, and cloud tags, and expanded workflows allowing users to better manage existing suppression requests.
Looking Ahead
In 2022, our teams will continue to innovate and transform the cloud management industry with more product updates and enhancements. We look forward to the new year and working with our customers and partners to drive better business outcomes.
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