Five Tips for Getting Maximum Value from a Cloud Asset Inventory | Amazon Web Services

Key Takeaways

Hi everyone, thanks so much for joining us. My name is Keegan Morazzi and I'm a partner solutions architect here at AWS where I help organizations discover, develop, and deliver solutions uh with partners. I'm joined here today with Joe Carlson from Cloud Query. He is a cloud developer advocate. Say hi, Joe. >> Hi. And yeah, let's jump into it. Huh. Thanks for having me, by the way, Keegan. I appreciate it. Um, this is our last video in our series we've been writing about designing, building, maintaining, and scaling up your cloud asset inventories. And today in this video, we're going to share five best practices we found are that separate successful cloud asset inventory programs from ones that fail at large enterprises. So Keegan, before we get started, I just want to ask you or I just actually I want to tell you, did you know that most organizations implement cloud asset inventories as a technical solution and then they wonder why adoption is slow and why no one's used it and they're not getting a lot of value out of it? because uh the difference that I have found is that there companies that get find successful implementations from their cloud asset inventories view it as not just a technological solution but a whole implementation approach to their business. So um let's talk about our five value maximizing principles for building out a cloud asset inventory. Successful cloud asset inventory programs follow these core five principles and they aren't just the technical requirements. They're organizational practices that we found that determine whether your inventory is being going to be a success or not. All right, let's jump in. >> Awesome. Awesome. So, we're going to start at the top here. The first business principle, the first principle we're going to talk about is business outcomes and not technical features. So, here's the framework. We want to define business value before we have any kind of technical implementation. And we don't want to start by asking uh what can we inventory, what can we query. We want to ask what problems and what challenges can we solve regarding our organization in our cloud infrastructure. So implementation means aligning inventory goals with business objectives. So are you solving compliance challenges? Is it cost optimization or security governance? You should always start at one point, one business challenge, nail it, and then expand. So, your success metric should be to inventory decisions directly to a business goal. Um, if you can't draw a line from a specific feature of an inventory of asset inventory to a specific goal like uh revenue protection, costsaving or risk reduction, then you shouldn't really be focusing on building it. Now, the biggest mistake that we see is building a comprehensive inventory without a clear business purpose. So, you end up with a really nice clean set of data, but you don't really have a use for it. and you ask yourself why your engineers and your business management aren't really using the solution that you've built. So, it really comes down to focusing on the business outcomes, what challenges you're trying to solve before just trying to get every single asset inside of your inventory. >> Keegan, I think that's like good evergreen advice for anybody. If you're building out a tool internally, like if you don't have core metrics and outcomes you're looking for, it's probably not going to work out too well for you. But, okay, cool. Let's move on. Principle number two, make sure you're constantly and consistently engaging all stack stakeholders, excuse me. Uh, and try not to operate in silos for the data. So, this is really about creating crossf functional teams that can get, you know, involvement from all different areas of the business. This isn't just an IT project. This isn't just a platform engineering project. It's a business capability that touches every aspect of the team. And by imple implementation teams here I'm include like talking about things like PinOps teams, security teams, compliance teams as well as like development and platform engineering teams that and you want to make sure you're engaging them from day one. They're not just the users. You want them to feel like co-owners who help define the requirements for successful criteria for building out your cloud asset inventory. And I love tying these principles to KPIs that you can utilize to make sure they're going to be useful. But a successful metric I've seen is tracking the number of teams that are actively using or accessing data from your cloud asset inventory. This could be even things like how many people and different teams are accessing a dashboard built using this or directly accessing integrating that API data into different workflows. Um if only one team is looking at that data, you've just built another echo chamber. Yeah. And no one wants that. Nope. Which brings us to our third principle, which is to prioritize high impact use cases first. So we already focused on having the right business outcomes and not to silo your data. But what do we mean by high impact use cases? It's those with immediate measurable business impacts. Right? We know that you can have a lot of different business outcomes you need to track, but we don't want you to boil the ocean. You want to find the highest value problems and solve them completely before moving on. So what does this look like in terms of practice? It means figuring out by talking to different teams and leaders in your organization and figure out what they care about and what needs to be handled at the highest priority. So are you trying to optimize and reduce your costs for the upcoming quarter? Do you want to try to get some new security and compliance protocols achieved in your organization? or do you even need to prepare for an upcoming audit? All of these are questions you should be asking and prioritizing before you go and set out to create your asset inventory or even modify an existing one. You always want to focus on identifying the ROI and having clear executive visibility. So um we want to win here first and then we want to expand our scope which takes us on to our fourth principle. >> Yeah. So we want to be able to provide actionable intelligence not data collection. I think that this is something that can commonly happen, right? You just build those data, you build these relationships, you make it accessible and no one uses it and the problem is that it's just it can be overwhelming, right? So starting those use cases going to help direct that funnel, that hose of information to solving a real problem, but you want to make sure you're providing it in a way that actually solves actionable intelligence. Um, so that means you can integrate the data and build workflows that'll help enable decision-m and making actions about your cloud, right? Either on costs or security, whatever. But the data is useless if people can't act on it within the same system. Implementation here means connecting the inventory to build pipelines, alerting, remediation steps or workflows allow or workflows for optimizing and governing your cloud. Um, so when someone finds an unencrypted database within your cloud, they should be able to remediate it immediately, not just report it. >> Awesome. Yeah, having the ability to act on it and to to to measure the insights is extremely important. Um, and that brings us to our final principle, which is to plan for continuous improvement and scale. So, >> as we mentioned earlier in other videos, uh, your inventory should be built to grow as your organization does. So new teams, new services, new apps mean new requirements and that your system should be able to adapt to them instead of breaking. So the common mistake that we see is that treating your inventory as a one-time implementation rather than an ongoing program. So you want to launch, declare your victory, then watch adoption >> change and be able to adapt to that as your organization's need evolve. Um you should have regular review cycles of your um asset inventory and always collect feedback from your primary stakeholders whether that's uh business leaders, engineers or um auditors that come and collect the data that you need. So Joe, do you want to talk about some critical success factors that go uh alongside these main value propositions? >> Yeah, just think of these like a speed round. These are just some tips that I've seen that I would love to just pass on to you from trying to get the most value out of your cloud asset inventory. Um, so first one, executive sponsorship. Again, evergreen advice. Make sure that you get visible leadership support through all phases of building out your cloud asset inventory. Like I think it can start as a grassroots effort if you see this as a need and you're solving this problem, but making sure that you get buyin from leadership is going to really help you find maximum value from that in the long run. Um, also change management is really huge too. I find that like getting value from this and if you really want to try to get people to utilize it, having training, having great documentation, communicating clearly and often about people who are going to be consuming data from this is really going to be key. People want need to understand not just how to use a system, but they need to understand why it matters and how it impacts the their daily work and the business. And finally too, I try to include little KPIs I like that tie to all these different business outcomes. But um I think a measurement framework with clear KPIs and a regular review process for those KPIs can be really important for continued success. Remember what gets measured gets managed. Technology here is the easy part. Organizational adoption is what's going to ultimately determine success for your cloud asset inventory. Yeah, those are great tips, Joe. Um, so just to give a recap on what we've discussed today and kind of the value proposition that we want to bring by this video series is to maximize inventory value as treating it as a business capability, not necessarily a technical project that gets checked off the list. So in order to recap on these steps we have at the top business outcomes you know to focus on what are the goals of the company what are the goals of the organization and focus on them rather than getting absolutely everything under the sun measured. Second, we have high impact use cases, right? So, we want to talk to our leadership and understand what are the highest impact, highest necessity items that we need to track and organize in order to make sure that our uh cloud asset inventory is up to date and focused on the right objectives. Next, we have no silos, right? So, we want to ensure that we involve all stakeholders from all different parts of the team. So things like FinOps teams to security teams and engineering teams very early on in the process as we make this asset inventory. Um fourth, we want to focus on actionable intelligence, right? So we want to make sure that we're able to act on the data that we receive from this inventory, right? We want to make sure that we're not just getting data that we look at and just say okay to we want to say this needs to get better. This needs to be changed. Uh we need to act on this. And finally, we want to make sure that we can always have continuous improvement. Times change, technologies change, cloud asset inventories also change. So we want to make sure to always be able to leave that room to adapt to be able to evolve quickly. Um, and that summarizes the cloud inventory value. This what you can get from it if you build it correctly. That's it, Keegan. Thanks for having me. This has been a blast. >> Thank you so much. Until next time. >> Till next time.