In many modern enterprises, busy employees use a mixture of internal, private cloud solutions and software platforms, while also casually using public cloud and software platforms.
This internal use of systems not necessarily designed and built in-house is called shadow IT, and it can be a big organizational concern, particularly as it relates to following regulatory protocol, data protection and more.
According to research from networking giant Cisco, the average large enterprise uses 1,220 public cloud services, which is more than 25 times more than IT staffers estimated.
To enable IT workers to find and monitor various cloud services being used, Cisco launched its Cloud Consumption as a Service platform. The solution is designed to discover and monitors public cloud use across an organization to help improve security and manage costs.
“We want to empower customers to monitor and manage cloud services,” Jim Melton, the technical architect of cloud practice for Cisco partner World Wide Technology, said. “Cisco Cloud Consumption not only helps with this goal, it also provides insight to help define the next steps in a customer’s cloud journey, and concrete data to build the business case for their cloud initiatives. Cloud Consumption is helping us evolve our customer conversations from products to business outcomes.”
Cisco announced the new software-as-a-service product on Jan. 13. The company said the price would be between $1 and $2 each month per employee depending on the size of the enterprise.
