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Image: Visibility into the Cloud

Today’s concept of moving data and applications to the cloud can mean a variety of things. More often people think of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions first, when they think of the cloud. Salesforce, WebEx, Microsoft Office 365, and other SaaS applications often come to mind. The expectation is that more companies will develop their solutions to offer their clients an application solution that is web-enabled. However, another growing trend is for companies to move on-premises applications to the cloud, utilizing compute power as a service, or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

The utilization of IaaS has often been associated with engineers and testers utilizing the services to quickly “spin up” the development of new applications and test environments, without having to involve IT. However, companies are now leveraging IaaS to move their commercial applications onto IaaS cloud services provided by companies such as Amazon Web Services. According to a June article in CIO Magazine, “6 Trends Shaping IT Cloud Strategies,” as of February 2017, AWS is now operating at a greater than $14 billion run rate, with customers going all-in on the company’s cloud infrastructure services.

The growing trend has caused some new challenges for IT departments trying to manage IT assets. On-premises discovery tools often do not have the complete cloud instance specific data required. The “short-lived” application instances put on the AWS platform are difficult to track and manage. Multiple user access to the cloud infrastructure leads to more complexity and confusion on ownership. Cloud visibility of IT assets becomes a new roadblock for IT asset managers, procurement, IT service management (ITSM), security—for proactively detecting end-of-life software, and more.

Flexera introduces Flexera + BDNA Cloud Asset Insights to provide the visibility of IT assets that have been deployed to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Cloud Asset Insights provides discovery and normalization for commercial software assets deployed via Amazon EC2.

Do you want to know more? Read our recent press announcement about Cloud Asset Insights.