Due to their vast nature, cloud infrastructures are complex. Hence, enterprises are choosing multi-cloud infrastructures over single cloud for improved ROI and greater efficiency. Such distributed usage also poses the challenge of efficiency for organizations. So, what can be done to tackle this challenge? Whether it is a single cloud or a multi-cloud deployment, one of the best solutions for organizations is the adoption of an effective tagging strategy.
What are Tags?
Tags can be defined as metadata containing tiny bits of user-defined data to help describe and identify the resources running across an organization’s cloud environments. Hence, a proper tagging strategy is an essential tool for gaining granular visibility into one’s cloud consumption and expenditure. One can go ahead and say that tagging is an integral part of any enterprises’ cloud governance strategy.
Challenges Faced in Implementing a Tagging Strategy
However, introducing an effective tagging strategy across your cloud environment can prove to be a complex task, especially if you have a multi-cloud environment. Despite users trying to implement the perfect tagging strategy, most cloud providers present some or other kind of limitations, often leading to inefficient tagging of resources. Hence, users are unable to make tagging a culture at their organization and it becomes just another task for business units.
It is evident that tagging provides a lot of benefits, so why are organizations not lining up to establish a tagging practice? The answer to the question is the complex nature of tagging. An efficient tagging strategy requires effort, resources, and complete expertise. Another reason behind difficulties in implementing tagging is that many organizations never went for tagging when they migrated to the cloud and deployed their first workloads. The lack of dedicated expertise is yet another perennial problem that organizations face when it comes to implementing a dedicated tagging strategy.
Benefits of Tagging Your Resources
Before going ahead and implementing tagging across our infrastructure, we need to understand the value that tagging bring to the table for an organization. Proper tagging of one’s resources helps bring back ownership and accountability from IT to individual business units while increasing visibility into resources in any cloud infrastructure. Tagging also helps in the deployment of new features, security policies, and many other tasks.
Proper tagging of resources also introduces chargeback to the mix, solving one of the biggest challenges of organizations with multiple business units spinning up workloads. Chargeback allows an organization to trace back the consumption of any resource to its department, effectively informing them of the cost center it belongs to. With such visibility into the deployment of resources, tagging makes it easier to identify business-critical resources that should always be running while separating the under-utilized or unused resources, identifying potential areas for savings.
How Centilytics Helps
Tagging is undoubtedly the need of the hour, but introducing an effective tagging strategy requires expertise and resources. This is where Centilytics — an intelligent Cloud Management Platform — comes in. At Centilytics, we believe that your organization should have a proactive stance toward tagging of your resources. Centilytics’ Tagging Compliance ensures reduced cloud bills, greater visibility, better governance, and increased ROI by helping you define company-wide nomenclature of your tags and many other features.
Centilytics provides a single-pane-of-glass view for your resources, thus helping in setting up of conventions and filters to ensure minimal number of resources are mis-tagged or untagged. Any mis-tagged or untagged resources can then be easily identified and fixed with even the opportunity of automating the alert mechanism for the same. All this and more comes in a customizable dashboard for infinite possibilities. Unleash the power of efficient Tagging Compliance in the cloud and create a culture of accountability at your organization today.
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