IaaS Tool Certification Standard
Our IaaS Tool Certification enables ITAM Managers and other Cloud Cost Management professionals to select the right tool to meet their cloud management needs. 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 criteria will also form the basis of IaaS tool certifications. For more information about our tool certification programmes, please see here. This is an open, community-sourced standard and we welcome your participation in developing it further. If you would like to contribute, please contact us.
For a PDF version of this standard please click here
IaaS Tool Certification Criteria
Providers
Does it manage Azure?
Does it manage AWS?
Does it manage Google Cloud Platform?
Does it manage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Does it manage SAP Cloud?
Does it manage Alibaba?
Other?
Cost Savings
Does it recommend right sizing of VMs?
Does it recommend shutdown of workloads?
Does it recommend workloads for Reserved Instances (RIs)?
Does it manage Reserved Instances purchasing?
Does it detect unused Reserved Instances?
Can it recommend Spot Instances?
Does it enable manual rightsizing?
Can it perform automated rightsizing?
Technologies
Can it detect and report on Bring Your Own Licenses (BYOL)?
Does it manage containers in the cloud?
Does it manage containers on-premises?
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 discover 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?
Can it track Oracle ULA licenses in the cloud?
Policies
Can cloud policies be created and applied?
Can policies be automated?
Can it track tags?
Can it enforce tags?
Can it retroactively apply tags?
Can it restrict access to resources based on policies?
Workflow Orchestration
Can it perform orchestration tasks?
Does it have an end-user provisioning portal?
3rd party integrations
Okta
Terraform
Ansible
Salt
Chef
Puppet
Others
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?
Can you create cloud agnostic reports?
Can you schedule automated emailing of reports?
Can you set audit only roles (no edit permissions)?
Can you set alerts for sudden spikes in cloud costs?
Pricing & licensing
Do you have different levels/editions?
How is the tool licensed?
How is the tool priced?
Is there an on-premises hosted offering?
Is there a SaaS offering hosted by you?
Is there a hosted offering via partners?