Many organizations have accelerated their digital transformation in response to COVID-19 to remain resilient and competitive, and have made significant investments in the cloud.This trend will extend well beyond the initial stages of the pandemic, with IDC’s forecast for spending on “full cloud” services to exceed $1.3 trillion by 2025.
Unfortunately, side effects of these extended architectures include increased risk of shadow IT and unauthorized cloud access, as well as disparate toolsets that can lead to governance gaps. Better asset visibility is key to addressing these issues, and one of the most powerful items in the Visibility Toolkit is cloud tagging – the process of tagging cloud assets by some attribute or operational value for better organization, search, and Filter these assets.
Let’s examine how enterprises can upgrade their cloud tagging skills to address the additional security and governance barriers posed by scaled and distributed cloud architectures, and how state-of-the-art cloud tagging approaches unlock behavioral insights to optimize and automate network asset management at scale .
Proper tagging is at the heart of effective cloud governance for reporting, billing, cost optimization, compliance, and more. However, despite the value cloud tagging brings, too many organizations do not have a consistent strategy for this fundamental function. Many have acted so quickly to acquire technology in the rush to digitize during the pandemic that tagging has sometimes become an afterthought, or tagging methods have not been properly followed, if at all.
To be sure, even before 2020, inadequate migration strategies have become a phenomenon. But COVID-19 has exacerbated the problem as more organizations scramble to build new IT services and cloud resources to accommodate the business impact and work-from-home requirements of the pandemic era. It’s not just an inconvenience. It leaves organizations vulnerable to increased risk from breaches, ransomware, shadow IT, and other threats.
Especially as systems grow in size and new technologies are added, insufficient tokenization can create governance and security breaches due to system misalignment. Edge computing, for example, can significantly increase available data and reduce latency—but if these sensors, video feeds, or other edge assets are not adequately tagged and monitored in enterprise architectures, they also represent an additional entry point for hackers.
Tagging enables governance and security through better data and asset discoverability and a deeper understanding of the context in which network assets operate. In this sense, think of cloud tagging as a subtle and dynamic way of making metadata work for an organization. Mastering metadata allows you to enhance governance and security by better connecting and combining disparate data sets, and cloud tagging is the core operational framework for achieving this.
3 Ways to Optimize Markers
The conclusion is that cyber risk and shadow IT have fewer places to hide in digital systems with robust metadata management and cloud tagging programs. Advanced cloud tagging can also be the overall foundation for a more dynamic and data-driven approach to network asset management. Here are three priorities to help drive this outcome.
Take an “algorithmic” approach
Labels can represent not only the properties of assets (such as region, department, cost center, owner, etc.), but also the processes that those assets are subject to. This presents the opportunity to take an “algorithmic” approach to tagging – effectively setting up a rules engine that applies the policies you create based on the tags you want. This allows you to track assets and strategies for managing them, even on dynamic and elastic platforms that may grow or shrink. It’s important to thoroughly grasp the nuances of attribute and policy tagging to avoid missing features or mislabeling tags with unintended consequences.
Embrace the label culture
Make sure to designate stakeholders as managers responsible for instilling a culture of labeling in the organization to enforce consistent processes and parameters. Especially for a distributed workforce, this management role may involve the execution of certain tagging formulas; retroactive tagging when developers may have added assets or features or services that they do not want tagged; stable monitoring of business output to ensure tagging Efficiently and optimized for business needs and asset-derived business value. Throughout the process, the role of the steward is also to ensure that these considerations feed into the automated processes needed to do cloud tagging at scale.
Optimized automation, scalability
Even the most strategic tagging methods can collapse on a massive scale if they rely on manual methods prone to human error and capacity constraints—especially given the dozen or so teams that may define assets and the processes and policies they follow. more labels. The good news is that the auto-tagging protocol not only enables scalability, but also provides dynamic infrastructure configuration for IT financial management, as well as automated reporting for better security, compliance reporting, and cost management.
Just as labelling is at the heart of transformation, automation is at the heart of labelling. With the right tags, you can index and manage digital infrastructure and operations of any size, provided you automate the dynamic tag writing process through automated scanning or similar. In other words, bringing tagging and automation together will ensure tagging can happen at the scale and speed of a modern enterprise. This is the best way to build a solid foundation for an optimized cloud infrastructure – capable of supporting advanced network asset management for better security, governance and system performance.
