What is Cloud Data Management?

Unstructured Data Chaos 

In the B.C. (before cloud) days, enterprises knew where their data was, mostly because it was stored onsite within reach and under tight control. Today, an enterprise’s data estate can feel like the digital wild west. Data doesn’t exist in just one place – it’s here, there, and everywhere, stored in a seemingly infinite warehouse in the sky under the management of outside cloud providers.

This makes for a more complicated management scenario. Understanding where your cloud data is and what it’s telling you (much less costing you) is more challenging today due to disparate information siloes. This makes a big difference when trying to effectively control & manage cloud costs, increase efficiency, and comply with necessary laws and regulations. It’s easy to falter under the weight of unstructured data chaos.

Rising Cloud Costs and Financial Management Pressures 

With more cloud spending comes more pressure on financial and IT leaders to rationalize cloud budgets, align resources to business needs, and accurately forecast budgets and spending trends. IT teams feel the pressure to validate current costs, ensure cost-efficient operations, conserve precious IT dollars, and prove the financial return associated with any investments in cloud technologies.

This is a complicated pursuit, which is why most businesses turn to a trusted partner offering multi cloud data management services.

Here are the top five benefits of Cloud Data Management and a service provider:

1. Deep insights into cloud usage and costs: Cloud data management is key for understanding how cloud assets are used and how expenses are managed in order to reallocate resources, cut costs, and get more value out of existing technology investments.

2. Performance tracking and benchmarking: Untangling your cloud data estate enables you to track and trace exactly where your spending goes in real-time to establish a continuous cycle of monitoring, analyzing, and refining cloud usage and spend to ensure continuous ROI. Without data management, you can’t determine how and why spending aligns or misaligns with financial budgets, who is responsible for expenditures, and more.

3. Build a FinOps culture of trust and collaboration: A clear view into all cloud data promotes the level of organizational transparency, accountability, and visibility needed to drive operational excellence and ROI without wasting resources or adding unnecessary complexity.

4. Optimize cloud service usage and rates: A comprehensive and accurate view of all cloud data is key for matching cloud services and resources to actual business needs, figuring out where assets are mismatched so you can start scaling or rightsizing across IaaS, SaaS, and UCaaS as well as optimizing cloud contracts and the rates you pay for them. For example, cloud data normalization is a key exercise in identifying unit costs across multiple cloud service providers and making apples-to-apples price comparisons.

5. Ensure cloud data security: Cloud data management, as part of a comprehensive FinOps solution, secures the entire cloud estate using strict governance protocols based on industry regulations, security frameworks and best practices – all while eliminating overspending.

A DIY approach to cloud data management isn’t impossible, but very difficult. The amount of data you must collect and analyze is the first challenge. The work is unfit for humans, manual data entry, and spreadsheet analysis. Instead, companies should use integrated platforms and advanced AI analytics. Plus, the need for relentless governance and oversight often becomes too much for teams to handle internally, explaining why almost 90% of IT decision makers can’t get a solid view of their cloud costs quickly and nearly 70% are unsure if they’re delivering the right service levels their business needs.

As more organizations move their operations to the cloud, poor cloud data management obscures the full picture further – making it that much harder for IT and financial teams to understand the impact of cloud spending on their company’s bottom line. All in all, two-thirds of CIOs are spending more on the cloud than they anticipated, proliferating unsanctioned applications are consuming 30-40% of IT budgets, and companies typically waste up to 30% of their cloud resources.

Traditional data management focuses on on-premises cloud & IT assets using traditional storage databases that run on local servers and computers, whereas cloud data management focuses on cloud workloads using cloud-based databases that are hosted and managed by a third-party cloud service provider.

The latter is tailored specifically to the needs of the cloud:

• Storage maintenance, backup, disaster recovery and security are handled by the third-party provider.
• Cloud data management models use modern constructs like containers and serverless for faster and scalable deployment.
• They are easy to install and set up with a simple pay-as-you-go model, allowing you to pay only for the storage and data management services you use.
• They are easy to manage, with automatic upgrades and patch management.

Tangoe One Cloud is an end-to-end solution that provides expense and asset management in a single platform for public IaaS, private cloud infrastructure, SaaS, and UCaaS. Here’s why businesses come to us for their cloud data management needs…

Widest Visibility into the Cloud

Cloud data visibility – and thus, management – is highly contingent on data ingestion. No one comes close to the level of integration Tangoe supports across the cloud ecosystem: a multi-cloud solution supporting four major cloud service providers, direct SaaS integrations with 775+ apps plus support for 225K other apps, a Shadow IT discovery process that mines information across nine different sources, and unparalleled user analytics for Microsoft 365.

Our cloud cost optimization engine crunches data across this connected ecosystem every four hours to deliver the clearest perspective on software and infrastructure services.

Smartest AI Platform Powering FinOps

A powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine positions Tangoe One Cloud above the rest, enabling our clients to save more than they could alone. In fact, enterprises activating a FinOps model using AI-powered software are 53% more likely to report an overall cost savings of greater than 20% compared to those not using AI.

Learn more about the benefits of an AI-powered FinOps strategy.

Broadest Choice and Flexibility in Cloud Cost Management

Tangoe One Cloud is a lean, mean, cost-cutting machine that satisfies the needs of all stakeholders across the cloud cost management ecosystem. The platform bridges the divide between IT and finance teams to synergistically operationalize FinOps, driving cost optimization and efficiency in cloud financial management simultaneously.

Savings that Go beyond the Cloud

Tangoe doesn’t just optimize cloud costs – it’s the industry’s first comprehensive platform to control cloud, mobile, and telecom costs with guaranteed savings. When you’re ready to simplify, manage, and optimize more than just your cloud estate, Tangoe seamlessly scales cost optimization for your mobile devices and telecom services to take your savings across more of your IT environment.

Read the full brochure on Tangoe One Cloud.