Welcome to the third and final blog in the Cloud Management Professional Services series dedicated to all things VMware Aria CostTM powered by CloudHealth (formerly CloudHealth)! In this blog we will discuss VMware Aria Cost governance processes within your multi-cloud environment and how VMware Professional Services can help your organization on its multi-cloud journey to achieve your outcomes faster.
What is governance and why should I leverage it in my multi-cloud environment?
In our second blog, How to Implement CloudHealth Faster: A Guide to Optimize Costs in Your Multi-Cloud Environment, we reviewed perspectives, budgets, cost allocation rules and reports, but we didn’t cover how to put stronger governance in place to ensure operational and financial effectiveness. Without the proper controls and asset clarity, it’s almost impossible to measure or improve efficiency, understand what is driving growth or visualize data that is clear to your business needs. VMware Aria Cost has many capabilities to help your organization understand any potential pain points, both from an operational and financial standpoint.
What are the key components of governance that organizations should implement?
Every organization will have different operational and financial goals; however, the concepts that teams will need to implement are the same.
Tags
One of the most important components is a consistent and well-thought-out tagging strategy. Tags allow the easy identification of assets throughout perspectives and subsequent views and reports.
You can assign multiple tags to an asset, allowing better organization across teams or business units, groups and more! Tags are the foundation to successfully implementing strategic governance. Our professional services team can provide guided workshops with key stakeholders so that decision makers get the information needed to set up comprehensive best practices for your organization’s tagging strategy within your multi-cloud environment.
Perspectives
In our last blog we reviewed perspectives and how they enable you to create unique business groups that reflect different sets of data for analysis and evaluation criteria. When implementing governance, you can take perspectives a step further to align them deeper within tagging strategies and visibility requirements. You can select individual or multiple tags when creating a perspective.
To learn more about perspectives, check out the VMware blog related to all things perspectives!
Reports
A key element of governance within VMware Aria Cost is the use of reports. Reports leverage perspectives to provide a granular level of detail to give the most comprehensive view within your multi-cloud environment. VMware Aria Cost has many new reports teams can utilize. VMware Aria Cost now offers a new report type called FlexReports that can be fully customized for an enhanced level of analysis.
Policies
Policies are a critical element of governance! Policies serve many purposes within the multi-cloud environment, including cost optimization, financial and performance management, and security. Policies within VMware Aria Cost leverage tags as well as perspectives to ensure there is full visibility into the multi-cloud environment.
VMware Aria Cost also has the capability to take action on those assets, such as alerts or even stage changes like power on and off, to ensure compliance.
Check out the VMware blog related to policies!
How can VMware Professional Services help?
To get value from your VMware Aria Cost investments faster and realize the multi-cloud benefits, including increased agility, scalability and speed of service delivery for new products and innovative services, VMware Professional Services can help! Our team has Governance Services that can help your organization set up multi-cloud governance leveraging best practices and industry-leading knowledge and expertise. Our team has a range of other services to help get you started with gaining visibility into managing and optimizing your multi-cloud environments and your cloud spend:
- Leverage best practices to design, plan and configure the VMware Aria Cost platform
- Identify and prioritize key actions and recommendations to optimize costs, boost performance and improve governance
- Build, identify and define key reporting and perspectives
- Allow for single percentage discounts for simple billing and unique rules for complex billing
If you would like to learn more about VMware’s Professional Services for VMware Aria Cost, check out the Implementation Services and Optimization Services information pages. For additional information on the VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth suite of products, visit the CloudHealth by VMware homepage.
