Cloud Insights: Knowledge is Power

This is almost always the situation with the adoption of new technologies, and cloud is certainly no exception. In fact, the number one reason for application 'repatriation' (pulling out of the cloud) is unexpected costs. But wasn't public cloud supposed to be the answer to these problems? Ultimately, any technology that is used for its intended purpose and applied appropriately with best practices should deliver the expected results.

The technology isn't the problem, we are. Our application infrastructures have become so massively complex and distributed that organisations can no longer properly control the management and costs of these environments. So what is the solution? More technology, of course. We now have the technology to manage the other technology and the sheer volume of data that we humans will never be able to grasp. This technology, of course, is artificial intelligence. AI has made its way into the operational world of IT in the form of AIOps and FinOps. But even AI beings require data - tonnes of it. In fact, the more data you feed them, the better the outcomes in terms of identifying ways to gain efficiencies and leverage them to deliver the optimisations.

How can we achieve all the benefits of adopting technologies and infrastructures such as the cloud? Or know when not to adopt cloud, but use a service provider, or maintain your own data centre environment? How can we truly make the best or most effective use of any technology?

If we adopt these environments, who takes the responsibility if things go wrong, or costs spiral out of control? There are numerous factors to consider when adopting cloud or engaging in any IT transformation or migration activities. And there are so many people and teams involved, across multiple technology areas and deployments, it's very hard to isolate and pinpoint the cause or multiple causes of issues.

There are three sides to every story - what you believe happened, what they believe happened, and what actually happened. Also known as 'your version, their version, and the truth.'

If we humans are automatically excluded from reliable sources of truth, then where does truth come from? Evidence. These days, evidence mostly comes in the form of data, and that data is typically collected by machines, which by design cannot lie. (For more information on this, check out my blog on the zero-trust model, 'The last real threat to data.')

NetApp has been focusing on exactly these issues, not just finding ways to drive down costs while improving speed and quality, but to ensure appropriate use of application infrastructure. Instead of pulling out of the cloud because the bill was higher than the TCO of hosting in the data centre, let the AIOps find where there is waste in your cloud. Discover where a workload has not been correctly sized for a cloud, and where that workload could potentially leverage other features for continuous optimisation moving forward.

We also use this same technology to identify, isolate, and help troubleshoot issues much faster, providing a very short mean time to resolution, but also a much faster mean time to innocence.

This technology I speak of is NetApp^®Cloud Insights, a powerful SaaS-based AI and machine learning solution entirely hosted and managed by NetApp. Cloud Insights provides monitoring, optimisation, troubleshooting, and security across an increasingly complex distributed hybrid multicloud landscape on an ongoing, continuous basis.