This series has described how to approach cloud migration and the associated cost management in terms of six essential questions that need to be addressed. In this final post, I would like to tell you a bit about our Asset Vision platform, and the features that make it ideal for supporting cloud migration and management of the resultant environment.

Single Pane of Glass

Many tools only give you the ability to look at your assets that reside in the cloud. Scalable’s “single pane of glass” concept means that you can see what’s going on both in the cloud and in your own on-premise data center, as well as across your workstations and other platforms. This is important when you are planning and managing a cloud migration, and equally so when you’ve completed your migration and need to make sure it keeps delivering value.

Integrated Platform

Many products in this market are modular in a bad sense – they are stitched together from various products (typically one for on-premise and one for cloud), and the components don’t always work well together. In addition, each module usually has to be licensed separately. Subscribe to Scalable’s product, on the other hand, and you get a complete, fully integrated solution, designed and built by us from the ground up. You’re free to use whichever elements you need from day one.

Normalization

This is the process of translating raw data that the system collects about your IT assets into a meaningful description that helps you with activities such as licensing – and indeed planning what to move to the cloud. Any piece of software or hardware that our software detects gets automatically checked against a central normalization database. This enables us to say that, for example, the task that a particular user is running is part of Microsoft Office 365, and we can then link this fact to the relevant licensing information. Scalable’s platform can recognize most applications straight out of the box – a strength that greatly reduces the amount of manual effort you will need to put in (though you can of course add your own apps to the catalog – see “Customization and Integration” below). This strength is due to our integrated, cloud-based, and crowd-sourced recognition engine, which has more than 1,500,000 entries. In addition to simple recognition and normalization capabilities, we also provide release and end-of-life dates, license metrics, and more – all of which adds up to insights you can act on.

Customization and Integration

If you need to record asset information unique to your organization, whether manually or automatically, Asset Vision IT asset management products will do the job. Asset Vision provides for custom field creation, either creating entirely new objects or extending existing objects. This feature can be used, for example, to keep track of the locations where an asset is being used, which can help optimize usage. Once defined, customization survives all platform updates and can be incorporated into any of the business intelligence functions.

Asset Vision has an HTTP API and an OData API, allowing simple integration with both on-premise and cloud sources. It is frequently used as a source of truth for IT assets for CMDB in ITSM tools such as ServiceNow, as well as tightly integrating with configuration management tooling such as SCCM.

Highly Granular Information

Many platforms will simply tell you whether a piece of software is in use at a given location, but our information is much more granular. You get detailed intelligence about how people are interacting with their workstations. When planning a cloud migration, you can work out, for example, which users might be satisfied with the browser-based version of Office tools and which need the full-blown application. You could also identify which users might able to use a cheap Chromebook instead of a high-powered laptop. This helps you go from a high-value capital asset estate to one that uses much cheaper devices or maybe even BYOD.

Full Visibility of Cloud Use

Asset Vision gives you a complete picture of what cloud apps and services are being used across your organization, including any shadow IT. This makes it possible for management to eliminate cloud sprawl and cloud shock, and to ensure that secure practices are followed. That way, you can keep control without unnecessarily restricting what the business can do.

Intelligent Insights, Fast

Asset Vision provides actionable insights after just two weeks of data capture, thanks in part to our inbuilt analysis and reporting engines.

I hope you’ve found this series useful, and that you now feel positioned to plan and manage your cloud migration with confidence, as well as to optimize the costs of cloud running in the future. Do contact me if you would like to know more about how Scalable can help.