Master multi-cloud management with Virima’s multi-cloud management capabilities
Table of Contents
- Multi-cloud management: Implementing a multi-cloud strategy
- Multi-cloud management simplified: Virima multi-cloud management capabilities
- Get started with Virima multi-cloud management capabilities
Businesses are increasingly adopting multi-cloud strategies to capitalize on the benefits of different cloud providers and infrastructure options. However, managing multiple cloud environments can quickly become complex and challenging. Problems such as lack of visibility, cost optimization, security, and compliance can set in. Without the right tools and strategies in place, it’ll be hard to implement a successful multi-cloud strategy.
That’s where Virima multi-cloud management capabilities come in.
Virima empowers businesses with a stack of features that help them tackle the challenges in a multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environment.
In this blog post, we’ll discover how Virima can streamline multi-cloud management with robust visualization, and efficient resource utilization, and enhance security and compliance. All of which ultimately drive the success of a multi-cloud strategy.
Whether you are considering adopting a multi-cloud approach or are already managing multiple cloud environments, this post is to help you unlock the full potential of multi-cloud management.
Multi-cloud management: Implementing a multi-cloud strategy
Multi-cloud deployment refers to the use of multiple cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure, to host the applications and services of businesses. One crucial aspect of following a multi-cloud strategy is the support for containers and Kubernetes. It helps in bundling applications and their dependencies in one container. As a result of such bundling, it becomes easier to deploy and manage them across different cloud environments gaining an easier workload portability.
Apart from it, implementing a multi-cloud strategy comes with several advantages. This includes building redundancy, introducing flexibility, performance optimization, and cost savings.
However, managing resources across multiple clouds can become a daunting task for businesses without the right cloud management platform and strategies. This is particularly true while enforcing security policies. This is because the more cloud vendors an organization uses, the attack surface area enhances proportionately. Along with this, the risk of policy violations is also enhanced.
This is where multi-cloud management comes in.
Multi-cloud management is the process of managing multiple cloud environments from a single interface. The objective is to simplify resource provisioning, monitoring, and visibility across clouds. Virima’s multi-cloud management capabilities also encompass cost optimization and taking care of security threats and compliance.
Major benefits of multi-cloud management
Optimized resource usage
When businesses use multiple cloud providers, they may end up underutilizing some resources while over-provisioning others. In this regard, multi-cloud management enables businesses to optimize their cloud resources. For example, Virima multi-cloud management through its ITAM identifies underutilized software and hardware assets in multi-cloud platforms. You can use them to reallocate to drive cost savings.
Enhanced agility
Next, multi-cloud management enhances business agility in the deployment of applications and services. It allows businesses to easily deploy resources across multiple cloud providers. Such deployment can help them leverage the strengths of each provider. For example, an e-commerce company can leverage AWS to host website and backend systems on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This allows for easy deployment and easier scaling based on web traffic.
Whereas the same company can use Azure’s global data centers to serve customers in regions where Azure has a strong presence. This can ensure low latency and improved user experience. Overall, such relative strength utilization as part of a multi-cloud strategy enables businesses to achieve faster time-to-market and improve customer experience.
Building redundancies
The next benefit of multi-cloud management is minimizing the impact of a disaster on business services. Not placing all eggs in one basket ensures the least impact on an organization when one cloud provider experiences downtime. It’s possible as the containerized workloads can easily be shifted between cloud providers. So the critical business services remain up and running until the issue is properly dealt with.
In this regard, the ViVID™service mapping among Virima multi-cloud management capabilities identifies the most critical IT assets across the cloud, and on-premise and creates an inventory of them. The dynamic visual dependencies between those critical IT assets and the services they support help identify alternative service routes. When downtime occurs in a multi-cloud environment, you’ll have a clear picture of which system to recover first to ensure essential services are up and running quickly.
Hybrid cloud management
72 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy in place. This means businesses are utilizing a combination of public and private cloud that is hosted in on-premise data centers. One of the main driving factors is the flexibility a hybrid cloud model provides. Both in terms of moving workloads in a way that suits their needs and the control over data. For example, using a public cloud to run enterprise applications and using a private cloud to store sensitive data.
Like in the case of multi-cloud management, you’ll need a hybrid cloud management platform to manage. But the good thing is, that the stack of Virima multi-cloud management features works for both multi and hybrid-cloud deployment.
Multi-cloud management simplified: Virima multi-cloud management capabilities
Gaining visibility of the entire IT resources across cloud environments
No matter if you’re managing a legacy on-premise IT environment or a modern combination of on-premise and cloud, visibility into IT resources is the first thing you need. For that, the main tool you need is an intelligent CMDB. But it can’t work alone. It needs the active help of an automated discovery solution.
Virima’s stack of multi-cloud management features comes with an IT asset discovery solution that discovers IT assets across multiple cloud environments. This includes major cloud platforms such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. This discovery process is automated, meaning that the platform continuously scans for new resources and updates the configuration management database (CMDB). It’s done through IP-based agentless discovery probes and Windows discovery agents.
Building a CMDB for your multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment
All you need is to add the API credentials of your cloud provider account (Say Azure). Then you can import all the discovered objects in that cloud environment to Virima. From there, you get the option to choose which assets to move to your CMDB. While discovering the cloud assets, you could be as precise and selective as what to move using flexible sorting features. Next, you can set up automated rules for the discovery. In case of discovering assets connected to on-premise networks, you just need to choose the subnets and ranges.
This way the CMDB can become a real-time visibility engine into the entire multi-cloud environment for a business. This CMDB-led visibility can be essential for managing cloud costs, optimizing resource utilization, and improving overall performance.
Furthermore, the discovery of IT assets across AWS and Microsoft Azure enables businesses to track changes as they happen. For that, you can integrate any ITSM provider such as ServiceNow®, Ivanti, Virima, or Jira. Virima discovery for multi-cloud environments also identifies redundant resources, and better understands dependencies across cloud environments. This information can be invaluable in troubleshooting, incident response, and planning for future resource deployments.
Cost optimization and resource planning through Virima multi-cloud management
Optimizing costs is one of the many reasons businesses are opting for a multi-cloud environment to deploy their applications and assets. Hence, cloud cost optimization forms a crucial aspect of a multi-cloud strategy. It focuses on minimizing the cloud spending without compromising on the performance.
In this regard, the powerful IT Asset Management (ITAM) capabilities greatly assist in Virima multi-cloud management. Virima’s ITAM module tracks and manages the cloud assets of businesses. This includes virtual machines, storage, networking components, and more, across multiple cloud providers as well as on-premise and private clouds.
Virima ITAM and multi-cloud cost optimization
The granular visibility through continuous agentless discovery identifies underutilized resources in multi-cloud environments. It may be that a company provisioned a set of virtual machines (VMs) in various cloud providers. They are assigned CPU, memory, storage, and network resources, but they are not actively performing any work. The ITAM can identify such underutilized resources from Viriima’s UI and cut unnecessary costs incurred on your organization.
In addition, Virima’s software usage metering, and allocation tracking in a multi-cloud environment analyze usage and claim underutilized resources. It also helps in right-sizing instances so that companies can identify opportunities for cost savings and allocation in their cloud IT environment.
Further, the KPI dashboard creating capabilities as part of the reporting engine of Virima ITAM helps companies to set up metrics critical to understand cloud spending patterns, resource utilization, cost allocation.
Moreover, Virima ITAM can monitor resource utilization and performance trends. This proactive approach helps ensure that businesses have the necessary resources in place to meet demand without overspending or experiencing performance bottlenecks.
Security and compliance management
The more a company adopts a multi-cloud environment to deploy containers and assets, the attack surface also increases in parallel. As a result, security and compliance management become paramount concerns. The need comes to secure your hybrid cloud (on-prem, public, and private cloud combo) environments and Kubernetes. So the cloud management platform or hybrid cloud management platform should secure your assets and manage threats across all cloud providers.
Virima’s Cybersecurity Asset Management (CSAM) solution, bolstered by its IT asset inventory management, and ViVID™ features, provides businesses with the tools they need to meet these challenges head-on.
Virima CSAM for managing vulnerabilities
Virima’s IT asset inventory management capability provides businesses with granular visibility into all hardware and software assets, both in the cloud and on-premises. It discovers, categorizes, and manages vulnerabilities by tracking the configuration of assets throughout their life cycle. As part of vulnerability management, it updates devices and software with the latest security patches. Also, it carries out upgrades and continuously monitors software licenses to prevent outdated or unauthorized software-led security breaches. This ensures an updated and robust cybersecurity posture in multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments.
The exclusive ViVID™ service maps as a part of Virima multi-cloud Management capabilities take this vulnerability management even further. Apart from the asset relationships, the maps also depict the assets having NIST NVD vulnerabilities. This information helps identify the vulnerabilities in the services that the IT asset supports and subsequently prioritize remediation efforts.
Managing compliance in a multi-cloud environment
Compliance with data sovereignty regulations is also one reason companies opt for a multi-cloud strategy. Some corporate policies, regulations, or laws may require the enterprise data to be located in certain countries or locations. In this regard, Virima’s CMDB as part of Virima multi-cloud management features can play a crucial role. It can provide enhanced visibility into CI data (including the locations) across cloud providers during compliance audits.
Similarly, IT discovery ensures all IT assets are accounted for and can be properly managed for compliance purposes. On a similar line, Automated ViVID™ service mapping provides a clear understanding of how different components interact and rely on each other. This allows organizations to assess the impact of changes on specific compliance standards.
Eliminate the guesswork involved in ITSM processes in multi-cloud and hybrid environments
Managing ITSM processes in a multi-cloud or hybrid environment can be complex and challenging. This is particularly prominent when the process demands a clear understanding of dependencies and the relationship between an asset in one cloud with another in a different cloud. Thus often guessworking becomes the norm.
For example, the CRM application of a company is deployed in one cloud platform. Other supporting services such as email marketing software, financial management systems, and support ticketing systems can be hosted on different cloud platforms. Now email marketing software can experience service outages or financial applications undergo upgrades. There can be a security breach in the support ticketing system that could expose customer data.
In either of the cases, you can not rely on guesswork to understand dependencies and relationships between the CRM system and its integrated applications.
The ViVID™ answer
This is where the stack of Virima multi-cloud management features comes in. Particularly, the ViVID™ service mapping provides businesses with a comprehensive view of the dependencies and relationships between applications and services. This view is available both within and across multiple cloud platforms. Moreover, these dependencies and relationship mapping are automatically carried out throughout the entire ecosystem. As a result, it is easier to respond to incidents such as those listed above.
On top of this, businesses can accurately assess the impact of changes or disruptions in their multi-cloud or hybrid environments. Whether it’s adding new services, migrating applications to different cloud providers, or troubleshooting issues, the application and service dependency mapping feature ensures that businesses have a solid understanding of how these changes may impact other components within the environment.
Get started with Virima multi-cloud management capabilities
Multi-cloud and hybrid environments are common. The sheer benefits it provides power its adoption among companies. Despite the benefits, managing IT resources across complex infrastructures can be challenging.
This is because multi-cloud management requires complete visibility of IT assets across cloud providers. Utilizing multiple providers also demands proper resource utilization and cost optimization. Also, you need to consider security and compliance management as the attack surface enhances as the number of cloud providers increase.
The solution lies in getting the stack of features that a cloud management platform provides for multi-cloud and hybrid management. One such solution is Virima multi-cloud management. The comprehensive suite of features such as cloud asset discovery, powerful ITAM, CSAM, and exclusive ViVID™ service maps can help the successful implementation of the multi-cloud strategy.
Want to know more about how Virima can help with multi-cloud management? Book a demo today!
