Improve multicloud performance and spend with predictive analytics

While having control over the cloud environment can help address these issues, gaining control is only half the battle. To truly optimize cloud deployments, enterprises need to proactively monitor and manage their clouds. This requires ongoing, real-time insight into cloud computing, capacity, and storage.

Hosted Private Cloud – Advanced Access provides control over the cloud environment at the hypervisor level, and a recent enhancement to this industry-first tool pairs real-time metrics and powerful analytics to help enterprises assess and proactively manage operations across multiple clouds. 

The case for analytics

Enterprises have widely adopted analytics to help them make more data-driven decisions and achieve better results. According to one study, 77% of respondents used analytics to aid decision making and 65% used them to help speed decisions.

The power of analytics is recognized across all vertical markets. Marketing organizations run analytics to assess the success of a campaign. Manufacturers utilize analytics to identify bottlenecks and improve the efficiency of their processes. Sports teams engage analytics to assess player performance and habits to gain a competitive edge. In the IT arena, leveraging analytics can head off or more quickly identify issues such as strained capacity, ineffective workload placements and overspending before they impact operational performance or stability.

Advanced metrics and reporting capabilities

The advanced metrics and reporting functionality within Flexential HPC – Advanced Access integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with thousands of performance indicators and utilization metrics across compute, network and storage to provide a level of visibility and predictive analytics that was previously unavailable. This insight allows enterprises to proactively assess the health of their cloud operations to optimize performance through enhanced security, better cloud configurations, advanced capacity planning, and improved deployment and migrations across multiple public and private cloud environments. This can all help enterprises achieve a more rapid return on investment.  

By leveraging this AI-driven, real-time insight, cloud managers achieve critical information and automated responses and a series of capabilities designed to continually strengthen the cloud environment. 

Optimized Environment
Using AI and ML, HPC – Advanced Access provides advanced metrics and reporting capabilities that deliver a new level of visibility into virtual and physical environments. Through predictive analytics and smart alerts, cloud managers can proactively identify and mitigate issues to potentially decrease downtime by more than half.* With real-time insight into the cloud environment, authorized users can also intentionally place workloads in the most appropriate environment to promote uptime, performance, security and more. The built-in technologies also allow cloud managers to predict, prevent and troubleshoot issues by correlating metrics, events, logs and configurations data to detect anomalies across multiple clouds more quickly. It also fosters more future-focused decisions.

Efficient capacity management
Offering enterprises 30% more visibility* into their cloud environments, this new functionality allows cloud managers to better recognize and address capacity issues and balance workloads before they impact operations. Without this visibility, capacity management is more reactive as cloud managers wait for performance to decline before making changes. Multicloud and hybrid cloud environments challenge this scenario even more as enterprises lack a holistic view of operations across all deployments. This can make it more difficult to reclaim and effectively reuse IT resources. Predictive capacity analytics also allow enterprises to forecast and plan for future capacity requirements.

Efficient Cost Management
The predictive cost analytics achieved via AI help organizations reduce costs and improve efficiency. Enterprises can effectively forecast future demand and provide actionable recommendations to prevent expensive performance or operational issues that can impact the bottom line. This is a key feature as an estimated 30% of cloud spend is wasted. The advanced metrics and reporting capabilities can also improve resource utilization costs by proactively addressing issues to minimize the time IT teams spend troubleshooting and fixing problems. By proactively avoiding issues, IT teams free up their time, allowing them to devote more attention to revenue-driving projects. In whole, these efficiencies can translate to a 2.4x ROI and 53% reduction in IT costs.*

Analytics and intelligent remediation
The intelligence built into the enhanced HPC – Advanced Access capabilities also automates reclamation, proactively right-sizes virtual machine (VM) workloads and enables policy-based automation to identify, remediate and regulate IT operational processes, standards, capacity and storage provisioning.  

Ease of access
All data is collected and analyzed within a unified monitoring platform. From this centralized location, authorized users can view real-time utilization metrics and historic details, build custom reports and set automated alerts to notify them when a pre-established threshold is reached.  

Integrated compliance
With six out-of-the-box compliance templates, HPC – Advanced Access helps ensure environments adhere to common regulatory requirements. The combination of integrated compliance and automated remediation reduces risk and enforces IT regulatory standards.

A final thought

As enterprises continue to look for ways to be more efficient and optimize multicloud environments, having control over and visibility into cloud operations can deliver tremendous value. The ability to more quickly and effectively make business-enabling decisions to control costs and improve performance can deliver a better environment and, ultimately, a competitive advantage for any enterprise.

Explore the FlexAnywhere solutions and how we help you respond to business requirements, growth initiatives, and changing market conditions - when you need it, as you need it. 

* VMWare vRealize Customer Benchmarking Study 2020