New analytics offering helps track hybrid cloud use

Increasingly businesses are turning to the cloud or to hybrid solutions for their IT. But this can make it harder to track usage and keep control of costs.

Californian company Cloud Cruiser is launching a new CloudSmart-Now solution that allows customers to easily track hybrid cloud usage by user and keep an eye on costs with built-in analytics.

It's designed so that businesses of all sizes can quickly understand the financial and operational impact of the cloud with a single pane view of their total consumption of cloud services. It has pre-configured templates with built-in workflow to collect detailed usage and cost data from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Windows Azure Pack (WAP), VMware and Openstack.

"Hybrid cloud is simply a reality for most businesses. The single biggest area of improvement continues to be around efficiencies and reducing costs", says Fraser McKay, VP Products at Cloud Cruiser. "We love the promise of low-cost cloud but it's not unlimited and unless you track and measure, sprawl and anarchy quickly creep in. Our customers stay ahead and better forecast to meet business demands. We directly address this problem with a single solution to manage all hybrid cloud environments. You can't manage what you can't measure and we've done the heavy lifting with this new packaged offering".

CloudSmart-Now provides pre-configured collectors, built-in data mapping to existing business structure, report templates and an automated workflow so businesses can distribute reports to business users.

Users need to select which of the 'Big 5' clouds they want to measure and select Cloud Cruiser workbook templates. Then using built-in API for public cloud and automated private cloud collectors they can import usage and rate data at a detailed level.

With organizational structure in place, business mapping allows them to map usage to department and owner. Finally a standard set of rich reports including top spenders across the business, cloud spend by provider, and potential savings.

CloudSmart-Now will be on display at VMworld this week or you can find out more on the Cloud Cruiser website.

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