SOLUTION BRIEF Simplify Your Google Cloud Platform Environment with Complete Transparency

The Challenge

Migrating to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can provide your business with the platform and flexibility you need to grow and innovate. However, whether you’re all in on GCP or adopting a multi-cloud strategy, you’ll face unfamiliar complexity in understanding cloud cost and usage across your business, and difficulty with enforcing guardrails for your environments. Native or homegrown cloud management tools might only provide a partial picture, especially if your business uses multiple clouds and needs to gain insights across many teams, cost centers, or functional groupings. How do you get granular visibility into your GCP environment to efficiently manage costs and enforce governance as you scale?

Simplifying your GCP journey

VMware Aria Cost™ powered by CloudHealth® is the most trusted platform to help organizations optimize and govern their GCP or multi-cloud environments. With VMware Aria Cost, you can gain detailed visibility into your GCP cost and usage data to make sense of what is happening in your environment. Using this data, you can gain control of your spend and further optimize your usage by taking advantage of tailored recommendations and implementing governance policies with automated actions. VMware Aria Cost can be further integrated with your business to create an accountable and scalable cloud financial management (FinOps) practice that establishes proven frameworks as you progress through your cloud management maturity journey.

A single platform to manage all your clouds

With diverse needs across their businesses, many companies today use more than one public cloud. This presents an obstacle that native tools simply cannot address. VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth supports all major public clouds, such as Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Alibaba Cloud, and VMware-based clouds. Our dashboards give you complete visibility into multi-cloud cost and usage history, allowing you to facilitate FinOps best practices across your organization, and track actual spend against your planned budgets. 

Granular Visibility with Relevant Business Context at Your Fingertips

Most businesses start gaining visibility into their cloud costs with the native tools provided by cloud service providers. But what happens when you need to understand those costs within the context of your business? It often requires considerable effort and time to fully understand how much was spent on compute resources for a specific application or line of business, or whether one of your engineering teams is spending more than necessary on resources it doesn’t fully utilize. You need the ability to accurately organize all the resources in your environment (even untaggable resources) into groups relevant to your business.
 

Perspectives in VMware Aria Cost allow you to create views based on groups of assets determined by their tags or other metadata, enabling you to more accurately track cloud consumption by the actual project, team or other relevant division in your business. After getting complete visibility into all your cloud costs, you can perform showback or chargeback, accurately reallocating costs to the business groups that incurred them. These cloud management capabilities are critical for driving accountability with developers and establishing a FinOps culture in your organization.

Control spend with policies and automated actions

Maintaining control of your environment as your business scales is a daunting task. A decentralized team of engineers with flexibility to develop applications using the resources they prefer opens the possibility for misalignment with company policies and industry standards. Building a centralized governance team, such as a cloud center of excellence (CCoE), is a great solution. VMware Aria Cost delivers the tools that CCoE leaders need to set guidelines and flag wasteful or out-of-policy behavior. The VMware Aria Cost policy engine enables you to quickly identify opportunities to manage spend, remediate risks, and streamline configuration. Set alerts to let you know when your cloud cost and usage are out of compliance, helping you stay ahead of potential problems and fix them before they get out of control. You can go a step further with automated start/stop actions for Google Compute Engine instances, allowing you to better manage and optimize your GCP environment.

Optimize your GCP infrastructure

With visibility into your cloud costs and usage, you can more accurately understand what your business needs to operate and how to efficiently meet those needs.meet those needs. Rightsizing recommendations from VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth are built transparently on user-defined business goals. Users can create custom efficiency targets, so the recommendations align with your business’s key performance indicators (KPIs). Set performance thresholds that make sense for your business, and take advantage of advanced filtering capabilities and region visibility. If you have any consistency in your cloud usage month over month, it makes sense to purchase committed use discounts (CUDs) to cover that consistent usage and reduce its cost. VMware Aria Cost can help you navigate the complexity of purchasing commitment-based discounts by providing historic and current cost and usage reporting.

Strengthen Your GCP Security Posture

VMware Aria Cost helps validate that you have properly and securely configured your GCP environment. With configurable policies covering user access, logging and monitoring, network security, and audit trails, VMware Aria Cost identifies violations and makes recommendations for how you can improve your security posture. Using the dynamic policy engine, you can automate security alerts, rank alerts by severity, and view a report of violations with affected resources and recommended remediation actions.

Services beyond the platform

VMware provides a world-class customer success service to make sure you get the most value out of your investment in VMware Aria Cost. As part of the service, you are granted exclusive access to a technical account manager and a customer success manager who will act as trusted advisors of the platform, and secure the alignment of your business goals and objectives. It also includes comprehensive training and education, onboarding, ongoing enablement, and technical support. Additionally, we offer professional services that help you accomplish tasks you don’t have the time and resources for internally, while taking your cloud governance and optimization to the next level.

Learn more

Ready to get started on your cloud management journey? Visit us online today and sign up for a free trial  of VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth.

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