Cloud cost management for Azure

ManageEngine has announced the availability of CloudSpend, its cloud observability and cost optimisation platform, for Microsoft Azure. Already available for AWS, the solution's business intelligence and smart forecasting capabilities have evolved to address the gap between capacity planning and cost optimisation for resources running in multi-cloud environments.

In recent years, public cloud adoption has seen exponential growth, with spending expected to reach $600 billion in 2023. Public cloud offerings are flexible and easy to use, and with proper security, compliance and scalability, businesses can achieve their goals quickly. However, cloud users often overestimate their cloud usage and provision higher thresholds for resources than needed. This leads to cloud resources being underutilised or, in some cases, never utilised.

CloudSpend targets the burgeoning costs of AWS and Azure adoption among public cloud providers. According to ManageEngine's State of IT Management Survey Report, 35% of the businesses have adopted a multi-cloud environment, of which 63% use both AWS and Azure.

"The cloud was embraced with the primary notion of reducing capital expenditure, but it inadvertently is why organisations bleed cash systematically. In a cloud-native world where organisations rely on the public cloud for their digital transformation, observability and optimisation are essential to streamline cloud operations and get the most of the money spent on cloud assets," said Gibu Mathew, Vice President, Zoho Corporation.

Highlights of ManageEngine CloudSpend

CloudSpend's notable features include:

Business units and chargebacks: With chargebacks, organisations can use native tags to make business units accountable and attribute tags to understand costs of different projects, departments, teams or cloud customers.

Budgets and forecasts: Businesses can define budget limits for AWS and Azure accounts and receive notifications when spending exceeds the budget. CloudSpend can also give insightful forecasts based on historical data.

Resource Explorer with out-of-the-box visibility: CloudSpend has nine types of system-generated tags to slice and dice organisations’ AWS and Azure expenditures. Teams can schedule reports on different aspects, including linked accounts, service types, regions and user-defined tags.

Multi-currency support: CloudSpend also supports multiple currencies, letting finance and IT teams view costs in currencies from 25 different geographic locations for various transactions.

IT automation: The solution can rightsize cloud resources via IT automation and integrate seamlessly with multiple third-party providers to keep track of spending across vendors.

With these features and many more, CloudSpend provides financial planners, IT teams and cloud service providers with the key business intelligence they need to streamline their capital expenditure and scale their businesses without wasting resources.