ITAM Review IaaS Cloud Tool Review Criteria

IaaS cloud tools are an area of growing interest to many ITAM managers. Managing cloud resources, and the associated spend, is a complicated task – with many environments spanning several cloud providers and 1000’s of services across global locations. Due to the sheer scale of cloud computing, a tool can quickly become a critical necessity for mature IaaS cloud management. While the exact ways in which cloud is used will differ from company to company, we have worked to define a key set of criteria against which IaaS management tools can be judged. These are:

Providers

• Does it manage Azure?
• Does it manage AWS?
• Does it manage GCP?
• Does it manage Alibaba?
• Other?

Cost Savings

• Does it recommend right sizing of VMs?
• Does it recommend shutdown?
• Does it recommend when things should be on Reserved Instances (RIs)?
• Does it manage Reserved Instances recommendations?
• Does it manage Reserved Instances purchasing?
• Does it detect unused Reserved Instances?
• Can it recommend Spot Instances?

Technologies

• Can it report on BYOL?
• Does it manage containers?
• Does it manage functions?
• Does it manage serverless?
• Does it detect orphaned storage?
• Can it manage Spot Instances?

On-premises

• Does it manage on-premises assets?
• Can it track and manage Microsoft Windows Server Azure Hybrid Benefits?
• Can it track and manage Microsoft SQL Server Azure Hybrid Benefits?
• Can it forecast costs of moving to cloud?
• Can it do application dependency mapping?

Policies

• Can cloud policies be created and applied?
• Can policies be automated?
• Can it track tags?
• Can it enforce tags?
• Can it restrict access to resources based on policies?

Budgeting

• Can you set budgets?
• Does it track spend against budget?
• Does it forecast spend?
• Can costs be aggregated across multiple cloud providers?
• Can you do Showback?
• Can you do Chargeback?
• Can it do cloud cost comparison?

Business Intelligence

• Can you create customizable dashboards?
• Can you view data based on different roles?
• Can you share data based on different roles?

Pricing & licensing

• How is the tool licensed?
• How is the tool priced?