Cloud asset management: A crucial missing ingredient

Most companies are in a race to diversify their cloud resources, motivated by the benefits of scalable, innovative, and effective operational capabilities. Despite dedicating large percentages of the budget to implement migration strategies, hybrid solutions, and multicloud deployments, business leaders often overlook a key yet underappreciated aspect of a successful cloud strategy: cloud asset management (CAM).

The repercussions of this mistake could be significant, both in terms of financial impact and operational effectiveness. By neglecting to address cloud asset management, companies risk incurring additional costs due to wasted resources, exposing themselves to security gaps, compliance issues, and inefficient operational processes. Still, for some unknown reason, CAM is often sidelined in discussions about broader cloud strategies.

The price of ignoring cloud asset management

Failing to recognize the need for CAM leads to additional problems. The financial aspect is the most paramount and urgent. Untracked and unmanaged resources such as idle virtual machines or overallocated storage accumulate costs that are often unnoticed until they appear on a bloated monthly statement. Worse still, the failure to properly track or tag resources can make it challenging to determine where and how budget dollars are being wasted. This lack of accountability leads to inefficiencies that could easily be addressed through proper asset management.

Security also becomes progressively worse when CAM is not prioritized. Unmonitored resources and insufficient oversight create blind spots, allowing misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to persist. These thinning spaces make enterprises vulnerable to data breaches and audit failures, particularly in industries with strict regulatory or compliance requirements.

Operational inefficiencies exacerbate these problems. IT teams often lack sufficient time to manage a complex web of cloud infrastructures, which leads to extended work orders. IT teams face daily obstacles, such as searching for underutilized resources, clarifying application interdependencies, or even identifying the owners of problematic deployments. These tasks should be automated using a robust asset management system. Ultimately, isolated management of cloud assets not only prevents teams from fully realizing the benefits of their cloud resources but also significantly impairs overall operational agility.

How to reposition cloud asset management

CAM enables companies to implement effective interventions, bringing visibility, structure, and efficiency to their fluctuating cloud environments. This practice is not about adding overhead costs or unnecessary bureaucracy, but it’s a key factor driving business value from the cloud.

Through cloud asset management, an enterprise can maintain peak levels of resource utilization while keeping alignment with its key business strategies. Specialized tools and processes can reduce costs, enhance security and compliance, and also improve IT performance. Most crucial is the clarity that CAM provides in complex setups, especially in multicloud and hybrid cloud environments where different vendors and platforms further obscure visibility.

Despite its essential role, many businesses erroneously view cloud asset management as a secondary issue. They put their primary focus on migrating or extending the infrastructure, which (they feel) gives them a better chance of success. This is a risky imbalance, of course. Even the best plan or add-on cloud strategy doesn’t fix the disorganized state of cloud assets, it just makes them mobile.

So, how do you effectively implement cloud asset management? Enterprises should focus on three major areas. First, introduce a plan for consistent resource tagging and automation. Standardization is equally essential because it is the tool to track cloud assets across teams, applications, and environments. Automation will take this further by allowing the continuous discovery of new resources, enforcing tag compliance, and uncovering underutilized assets or cost-saving opportunities.

Second, link cloud costs directly to specific applications. Problems usually arise from dealing with cloud resources in isolation. Every resource must be associated with an application, user, or service to better understand its performance and costs. The right tools will enable businesses to optimize cloud costs while planning for growth.

Third, integrate cloud security with asset management. This step is a must. It involves checking each cloud resource against industry or corporate compliance standards. Regular monitoring will ensure that vulnerabilities and misconfigurations are flagged in real time while centralized security platforms consolidate visibility across multicloud environments. By integrating security practices with asset management processes, companies will enhance their overall governance and mitigate operational risks.

The types and brands of the specialized CAM tools and processes you will need depend on the unique nature of each enterprise. A good place to start is by researching the top year-to-date CAM software programs and best practices. (See the links for helpful examples.)

Importance of cloud asset management

All too frequently, cloud strategies focus on migration, innovation, and cost savings without considering the primary method of cloud management that underlies all of these strategies. Failure to prioritize CAM leads to wasted budgets, unchecked vulnerabilities, and reduced agility.

Cloud leaders should turn asset management into a key element of their strategy—not just a support function, but an enabler of efficiency, security, and long-lasting success in the cloud arena. By implementing tagging, visibility into costs, and built-in security practices, enterprises will not only eliminate the expenses of disorganization but also reap the full benefits of adopting the cloud in the first place.

The bottom line? Cloud asset management is more than just a technical task, it is essential for business. Leaders who overlook cloud asset management do so at their peril and risk the success of their organizations. The time has come to take control of cloud assets and turn them into a genuine strategic advantage.