We’ve all had that moment when we try to understand our cloud estate and been over-whelmed by a confusing barrage of data – cloud inventories change quickly, a simple application requires tens to hundreds of resources, and generates thousands of billing records. How do we get a handle on that?
Usually, we invest in one of the many good cloud-management tools. We install it, run discovery and get some useful data and statistics. And it’s an improvement – now we can now see how many Azure virtual instances we have, or what the most expensive s3 bucket is.
But the real questions you have are about your business and organisation.
Questions like: Why do we have that s3 bucket in the first place? What’s it used for? Or, who do I talk to about it having open permissions or a sudden jump in costs? Or perhaps just: Help! – I need to issue a report showing the 10 most expensive cloud-based systems in the company.
Unfortunately, cloud management tools can’t provide out-of-the-box answers. They expect you to have already tagged each resource with business and organisational-related information. Without this detail, you’re limited in what you can analyse and report on. And in all likelihood your resources are NOT all tagged, meaning the next step is probably going to involve the setup of a small project team or task force to source the relevant information and create the business-related tags.
The cloud tagging project
Typically, the project starts with the Cloud Operations Manager and a few others gathering together for an initial kick-off meeting. An estimate is made of how many resources will need to be tagged – it’s going to be thousands! Concerns start to be raised: “We don’t know why some of these were created!” “We’re going to have to bring in people from the dozen other teams using the cloud to make sense of this” “Who is going manage all these people?”
So a project manager is assigned.
Weekly status meetings are convened. The number of people on the call increases as more stakeholders are identified – James can’t identify resources in one account, so passes it to Karen; she’s unsure and passes it to a system owner to see what it is used for. And round we go.
Progress is slow. It takes time to generate status reports to track what’s been identified, who is currently responsible, and what has actually been tagged. Multiple spreadsheets and versions of spreadsheets circulate. Frustration abounds as everyone is busy and it’s hard to switch in and out of this task amongst everything else that needs to be done.
Eventually, after the passage of many months the project is complete. The benefits are realised – there’s a better understanding of overall cloud usage, how it maps to the business services and systems the company uses. It’s clear which departments are costing the most and those systems showing a sharp increases in cost.
Senior management are overjoyed and relieved – finally they have some insight and control of their cloud investment!
The drift
Nothing is static however. Organisations move on, new projects are started, and new systems added; people come and people go, and cost centers change. Very quickly information becomes outdated, answers are less accurate and trust levels in your reporting diminish. To rebuild trust in the data, you need to review all the business related changes and update the tags.
And round we go again – do we resurrect the project team? Is there an appetite for a repeat of it? What happens next quarter or next year? Do we enter an endless cycle of cloud tagging projects?
A new approach is needed
This experience would suggest that the act of tagging, in and of itself, is not the issue here. Instead, problems arise from the time required to coordinate people and to prepare countless lists: untagged items, untaggable items, unidentifiable resources, resource ownership – you get the picture. And suffusing all this is the overwhelming sense of futility in trying to keep your tags aligned in an ever-changing environment. You are eternally chasing a level of accuracy that is forever just beyond reach.
Surely, there has to be a better way? An approach that puts business context first and forces tags to stay in line with it as it changes; that removes reliance on manual data collection and time consuming actions.
There is…
How Keytag helps
Here at Keytag, we’ve examined all the difficult aspects of the cloud tagging process and created an all-encompassing solution that merges a practical process with specialised software.
Let’s take a look at how Keytag’s alternative approach tackles some of the more common problems:
No More Accuracy Drift
Reduced work – less to tag
Faster Projects – no more spreadsheets, no more waiting for updates
Reduction in time spent on resource identification and tagging.
Certainty
Our approach may sounds utopian but it works! Get in touch and let’s talk about how we can make it work for you.
