Simplify cloud management
and governance


Cloud management
and governance
doesn’t have to
be complicated
The rise of modern cloud infrastructure has left companies asking how best to manage and utilise their new cloud estates – whether it’s traditional virtual machine usage or more advanced platform services. This is coupled with the fact that deep technical skills are required to manage modern cloud environments, but demand is outstripping supply in virtually every industry.
How can companies of all sizes manage things effectively and proactively as well as securely?
IA-Cloud, Part of Ultima’s Managed Cloud, is designed to help customers do just that
Take control
of your cloud
IA-Cloud is a SaaS based cloud governance and management service designed to help customers get the most out of the cloud with less effort.
IA-Cloud enables:

Simplified management, monitoring, governance and cost control, as well as real-world optimisation services.

Cloud-native monitoring that works with traditional virtual machines in the cloud, as well as cloud-based serverless resources.

Automated onboarding of new resources, as well as documenting your cloud environment as if you had your own technical consultant.
IA-Cloud helps remove the complexity of cloud and is compatible with Microsoft Azure and AWS.*
IA-Cloud – Intelligent Automation for the cloud, made simple.
*Coming soon.
“IA-Cloud giving you that
very quick access and
visibility saves you a lot of
time and a lot of money.”
Mike Cook, ICT Manager
at Sheffield City Trust
Feature Spotlight
Many customers want a one-stop shop for managing their cloud services, but these are difficult to come by. IA-Cloud is designed by technical cloud experts with over 30 years’ experience to bring together the features we know customers want into a single pane of glass.

Technical documentation that writes itself
Documenting your environment in the cloud is often the last thing on the to-do list. Let’s face it, who loves writing documentation? Couple to this the fact that cloud technology changes around three times faster than on-premise systems. This means documenting change is a continuous activity that needs advanced technical skills in order to understand what needs to be documented from the running environment alongside relevant settings and resources.
The IA-Cloud answer
IA-Cloud features an automated architect-level documentation service. So from day one of using IA-Cloud, your entire environment is documented, even down to Visio diagrams, and is written and presented like a consultant has written it. Best of all, IA-Cloud repeats this process for you every two months, saving you and your business an enormous amount of time, money and effort.

Advanced ‘real-world’ optimisation
The cloud differs in many ways from on-premises systems, including how you spend your IT budgets. The cloud operates on an operational, or OpEx consumption model where you pay for the resources you use.
Because of this, balancing costs and resources is critically important, and needs to be done continuously to make sure you’re not overspending. This requires technical knowhow of your resource’s configurations as well as time and effort.
The IA-Cloud answer
IA-Cloud’s advanced optimisation service is our jewel in the crown, and is our most popular feature. IA-Cloud takes the hard work out of optimising your environment. It provides accurate ‘real-world’ optimisation and change information that is simple and easy to understand. Better still, the service refreshes itself constantly to make sure your optimisation advice is up to date.


Native Cloud Monitoring
Monitoring in the cloud can often be tricky when you are used to working with just virtual machines and having to install monitoring agents everywhere.
How does that work where in the cloud you have to deal with resources that are serverless? We’re talking serverless databases, web apps, file storage, even your networking. You can’t shortcut this by extending on-premises monitoring for complete coverage, and agents are a no go.
The IA-Cloud answer
IA-Cloud has been designed with this in mind from the ground up. From cloud VMs to serverless, IA-Cloud will support it, backed by our own rulesets database for all your major resource types; and it’s a database created through real-world experience, from IOPs thresholds on your disks to 404 detections on your serverless web apps.

Automated hands-off discovery and onboarding
Onboarding new resources into your IT services environment can be fraught with difficulties. Manual onboarding is frequently done by multiple teams with different responsibilities as well as often requiring manual planning, agent installations and checklists.
The IA-Cloud answer
IA-Cloud takes onboarding to a whole new level, by accomplishing it without any human intervention.
IA-Cloud scans your cloud estate every day looking for new resources, and automatically onboards any resources it detects for all related services such as monitoring, management, governance, optimisation, documentation and more.

Simple security compliance and governance
Once you’re dealing with your infrastructure in the cloud, how do you manage your security posture for those resources? How do you know if things have been misconfigured, potentially exposing you and your business to all sorts of devastating scenarios?
You could go through all your resources and their configuration, but this will take a large amount of technical effort, time and money to do repeatedly, as configurations can change at any point.
The IA-Cloud answer
IA-Cloud answers this problem thanks to its automated security and governance reporting feature. It utilises our own cloud security experience, as well as industry best practice from the Center of Internet Security (CIS), and intelligently reviews your cloud resources and their infrastructure configuration. It then reports back on where you could make changes to particular resources, using easy-to-understand language, along with providing an overall compliance score.
Unlike other tooling, IA-Cloud’s intelligence only reports on security configuration issues that are important, rather than ‘spamming’ you with overloaded and bloated information.

ITSM or email integration
Customers in specific industries will have differing requirements around how they provide alerts and submit information into a central ‘source of truth’. Some customers have full-blown ITSM-based systems, while others rely on good old inboxes.
The IA-Cloud answer
For alerts and information delivery, IA-Cloud is designed to support ITSM systems, with a built-in ITSM connector. Our connector provides a standard payload that you can use how you choose in your ITSM configuration. All you need to provide is the API URL address and credentials.
No ITSM or just getting started? We can provide alerts to an email address of your choosing instead.
BAU Governance
Maintaining your cloud environment in the best possible condition requires continuous effort. As you grow, information sprawl becomes a real problem. Our BAU governance automates this information sprawl by centralising and simplifying, allowing you to concentrate on what matters.
And as part of Ultima’s Managed Cloud, your backed by our experts guiding you every step of the way.
How We Can Help

IA-Cloud Platform Only
Get started with your own internal resources. Invite as many internal users to the platform from your company as you need to manage your cloud environments.

Ultima’s Cloud Break-fix service
This is the same as our IA-Cloud platform-only offering but is designed for customers who want extra peace of mind and someone to call if the worst happens, or if they are in a bind and require some expertise.

For customers who are looking for a fully managed cloud service. Our technical experts from 24×7 managed service center are combined with our IA-Cloud tooling and Ultima’s ServiceNow ITSM platform. With our combined services our customers are backed by Ultima every step of the way in managing and administering your cloud estate. Check out our Managed Cloud brochure here.




IA-Cloud over the last 12 months
Optimisation cost savings total across all customers tracking best practice, wastage and performance
Approx. number of pages of documentation automatically produced through automation
Approx. number of alerts generated and delivered
Number of optimisation recommendations with remediation information
Estimated number of working days saved through automation
Number of resources automatically detected and advised as non-compliant against security best practice
Our Key Partners

Free eBook from the experts
The world we live in is vastly different from just a couple of years ago – no wonder it’s being called the new normal.
For customers who were already leveraging the public cloud, we saw a substantial increase in spending. Across our customer base, cloud consumption increased at an exponential rate, and this shows no sign of changing. This increased usage has, in most cases, been born out of necessity due to the demands of hybrid working and the need to provide services that are remote-first in design.
In our technical eBook, compiled by our cloud experts, we look at the key Azure public cloud trends for 2023, 2024 and beyond, backed by the unprecedented events of the past and looking forward.
