What does buying a car and managing a cloud environment have in common? If you don’t pay attention they both can end up costing you much more than expected. That’s why keeping a close eye on your cloud environment is very important. Have you heard of our Health Check Report? It lets us keep a close eye on your cloud environment so you don’t have to.
The CloudHealth Health Check Report is a critical tool for improving visibility and accountability in your cloud environment. The Health Check Report constitutes what we call a ‘Pulse Report’, or a report designed for or distributed to a C-level executive like a CIO, CTO, or VP of Infrastructure/ Clouds.
The benefits of the CloudHealth Health Check Report include:
- Increased cloud efficiency
- Improved cloud governance
- Identifying and mitigating your cloud risk
- Opportunities for cost savings
Let’s look at these benefits in more detail.
1. Increased cloud efficiency
In a fast-paced environment, it’s expected that operational decisions be made quickly. The Health Check provides a high-level summary of your cloud environment to help you make more informed decisions, faster. The report highlights possible optimizations for your cloud environment so that you can be more efficient in your cloud operations. These optimizations can be a result of Reserved Instance modifications or the removal of any unused, idle resources. As we commonly hear, customers deploy cloud resources and then forget about them until they see the bill from their cloud provider. The Health Check Report helps you avoid that shock.
2. Improved cloud governance
Your cloud environment is only as good as the hygiene that you establish for it— and your organization’s diligence to keep those practices in place long term. Especially if you are just starting in your cloud environment, you might not be aware of common pitfalls. For example, assets that are unallocated or untagged, such as untagged instances, are very common. If not addressed quickly, they can lead to a lot of cloud resource waste. The Health Check gives you a quick snapshot to help identify these assets and allow you to build and customize reports to focus on a particular business unit, owner, environment or function. This helps you establish better cloud management habits and drive more accountability across your cloud teams.
3. De-risk your cloud with confidence
Security is a critical component for any cloud environment. In this day and age, keeping data safe and secure is equally, if not more important, than reducing cost increasing agility. If you lose the confidence of your customers, your brand can be deeply affected. Based on the cloud best practices from the CIS Benchmarks and cloud providers, the CloudHealth Health Check highlights any potential security vulnerabilities. This alerts your team to take any necessary actions needed before something can potentially go wrong. As they say, prevention is better than cure. This report gives you recommendations about security related events in your cloud environment.
4. Save more money
Underutilized assets, like Amazon EC2 Instances, lead to overspending—a bad practice that can be easily controlled using the CloudHealth Health Check Report. We list your assets and how much money you can save based on the efficiency targets you define for your environment. This is calculated using each asset’s utilization and performance metrics. You can base it on min, max, or average consumption.
The Health Check also lists how much money can be saved by purchasing Reserved Instances. The Reserved Instances selection depends on how optimized you want your environment to be. This task can typically take a lot of manual effort and scripting, but with the Health Check Report, you can easily see your current environment’s spend and projected savings with just a few clicks.
Whether you’re embarking on your cloud journey or have been using the cloud for some time, it’s very important to know what’s happening in your environment. It’s easy to lose sight and realize a little too late that you’ve been overspending or running an insecure environment. This can be detrimental to your business and can hamper your organization’s growth in today’s world, especially where IT budgets shrink faster than they grow. We can’t promise that you will be a hero in your organization for using our Health Check Report, but you can definitely create an efficient, safe, and secure cloud environment. The CloudHealth Health Check Report has helped our customers save millions and it can do the same for you.
