08 January 2019

CloudHealth and IT infrastructure provider Softcat have teamed-up in an effort to bring enhanced visibility into public cloud environments. The partners say their service offers “greater insight” into spend, usage, and identifying efficiencies across all cloud platforms.

CloudHealth is a cloud management provider which is now part of VMware, while Softcat is an IT infrastructure provider. According to the two companies, while many organisations are currently adopting public cloud to be more flexible and to cut costs, some are finding that their lack of experience operating in such an environment leads to loss of control over the services consumed. They say this is resulting in higher than expected costs, and no insight into what changes to make in order to reduce the spend.

CloudHealth and Softcat reckon that by combining their strengths, they are able to address this issue. Softcat says the knowledge within its UK-based Cloud Intelligence Service team is used to complement CloudHealth’s platform by offering personalised support to customers. It’s claimed that by improving their visibility and better aligning cost to the value it generates for them, customers have been able to use the service to reduce their cloud spend by an average of 20-30 per cent.

The Cloud Intelligence Service generates automated reports about an organisation’s public cloud usage, in AWS or MicrosoftAzure, as part of the service they offer. The reports are designed to provide an overview of the cost and performance of individual cloud resources to highlight inefficiencies. They then offer suggestions on how to address this, as well as flagging areas of overspend and highlighting gaps in provisioning.

In addition, it’s claimed the service enables an organisation to control its cloud environment by highlighting any deviations from its desired governance position, for example, highlighting when assets are deployed that fail security best practices.