What is Cloud Asset Management (CAM)?

Asset management is highly adaptable for cloud environments. The major cloud providers also provide native frameworks and tools for their platforms.

Google’s Cloud Asset Inventory is designed to give real-time information, pulled from Google Cloud resources and policies, on the current state of your cloud assets throughout the organization. Integrated automation tools can then use this information, or snapshot, to monitor for any security or policy violations and take corrective action if directed. For further analysis, the asset inventory’s metadata history can be exported. Google also plays well with others, by integrating with other Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools organizations can create a unified, comprehensive view of all their resources throughout all environments.

AWS offers a similar set of tools, the AWS Systems Manager Inventory. The AWS SMI collects metadata from assets, and if connected can save it to an Amazon S3 bucket where analysis can reveal their state. AWS promotes this process as a one-click procedure. AWS is customizable, allowing the collection of custom parameters, as well as scheduling collecting items.

As well, and beyond simply creating an inventory, IBM offers their IBM Multicloud Management Platform (MCMP) Cost and Asset Management (CAM) that analyzes costing and performance, continuously informing leadership of wastage and cost savings opportunities, effectively answering, what does it cost to run the business, to provide IT services? What resources and how much are being consumed? Where are the best areas to make trade-offs, or shed unused services? And how can IT align more closely with future goals.

Luckily, asset management software for the cloud is effective. The following are asset management best practices that can further set organizations up for success.

• Seek Operational Excellence — Operational excellence means developing a foundation of observability, automation, and scalability. This can mean setting up automation, monitoring, alerting, logging, cloud support, capacity and quota management, understanding peak traffic times, and promoting a culture of reliability.
• Design System Reliability — Reliability is shared by everyone in the process of developing and delivering services. While no single best practice can fully address system reliability, understanding that reliability is not a goal to achieve but rather a state to maintain can shine light on how to proceed. Reliability does not need a costly 100% uptime, reliability is supported by rapid innovation and development, and reliability is usually a top feature.
• Optimize Costs — Every aspect of the network, and cloud environment should be monitored and watched to determine how to optimize costs. By making costs visible, encouraging cost responsibilities in staff, enabling collaborative optimizations, harboring a culture that seeks innovation over blame, and focusing on business value, companies can optimize their costs with more control and insight.
• Optimize Performance — Performance should be optimized through autoscaling and data processing, using GPUs and TPUs, and accurately identifying apps to be tuned up.

Asset management is a basic business process that helps decision makers to reduce costs by tracking and monitoring the performance of company assets. This is a process that companies can extend to their cloud resources, and in fact should. It is estimated that 50 billion devices are now connected to the internet in 2020. But, the staggering number of virtual assets in the cloud can far exceed this. It’s because of this rapidly ballooning of devices, VMs, license, etc. that asset tracking is a necessity.

For organizations, the main aim of asset management is control and visibility in an ever expanding ecosystem of trackable entities. In order to get a 360-degree view of asset life cycles, companies can deploy cloud asset tracking software with automated functionality to discover and catalog new assets, and then follow them through to disposal.