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    Cloud Cruiser: Managing Your Cloud Cost

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    5 New Use Cases for the Public Cloud

    IT organizations are quickly moving to embrace the notion of having multiple cloud computing options. The challenge now is figuring out which application workload to run where, based on the actual costs of running a workload on a specific cloud platform.

    To make that simpler to ascertain, Cloud Cruiser has unfurled a version of its cloud analytics software that can now be invoked as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. Rather than going to the trouble of setting up an application that is not going to be used every day, Andrew Atkinson, senior director for product marketing at Cloud Cruiser, says Cloud Cruiser now makes available version 16 of its namesake application as a service.

    At present, Cloud Cruiser 16 is designed to make it simpler for IT organizations to identify the true costs of deploying application workloads on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Compute. Atkinson says down the road, Cloud Cruiser might add support for other clouds, but right now these three represent the lion’s share of the demand for cloud services being generated by cloud customers.

    In general, Atkinson notes that while it’s easier to spin up virtual machines than ever, IT organizations need to encourage responsible usage of cloud services. For example, even though a virtual machine is dormant, it still consumes cloud resources that show up in a monthly billing statement from a cloud service provider. IT organizations, says Atkinson, need a tool that allows them to understand not only the amount of cloud resources being consumed, but also at what cost.

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    In the case of Cloud Cruiser, that means making use of SmartTag technology to track usage of cloud resources. The metadata generated by those tags is then used to both analyze the cloud environments and generate suggestions for efficiencies, using a recommendation engine, to reduce costs.

    Obviously, most organizations using cloud services are going to be pre-disposed to invoking analytics as a cloud service. And while each cloud platform already makes available its own analytics, Atkinson notes that there’s much greater clarity when IT organizations can more easily compare apples to apples using the same pane of glass.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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