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.

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.

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.

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.

Getting to grips with what your Azure consumption looks like day-to-day, or month-to-month can be challenging, especially when you have multiple departments and teams in the mix.

Working out who has consumed what, or allocating unexpected resource costs, can be very time-consuming.

IA-Cloud introduces low level cost management and analytics. Through our own unique design, we provide customers with machine learning-based analytics such as cost anomaly detection and forecasting details. We also highlight significant cost changes between periods and a breakdown of relevant information.

Need to cross-charge to departments or teams via the use of tags? Not a problem – IA-Cloud pulls in resource information including tags, and allows you to sort for this exact scenario over custom time periods.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.