In the last two years, we've used Cisco Cloud Consumption Assessment and helped many customers discover and understand their cloud services, costs and security risks.

The results are surprising! On average, enterprises use nearly 675 cloud services, have much more risk controls needing attention, and use the same cloud services across multiple categories like compute and storage. After a cloud assessment, most IT and business leaders find themselves faced with a TON of cloud usage. So what should they do next?

Want an example? Well, we recently worked with a multinational corporation and discovered they had more than 200 computing cloud services (IaaS), 80 finance cloud services (SaaS), over 50 services ERP related systems, and 40 collaboration (SaaS) services. This IT team was stretched so thin, they didn't even know where to begin or what to next prioritize to reduce risks and costs.

So, What Are My Next Steps After An Assessment?

Well, there are several clear steps that you can take to better manage your cloud use after an assessment:

1. Have visibility into your cloud and manage your lifecycle -Once companieshave a peek into their cloud usage, they need to establish on-going cloud monitoring and establish people, processes and tools to manage cloud services ranging anywhere from on-boarding to termination including risk and cost mitigation strategies.
2. Optimize risk and costs: ask yourself who and where is Cloud being used?-Identify which departments and individuals are using high risk or redundant services -and how.
3. Piece together all of your cloud services -Consolidate cloud services across categories, and work with departments to assemble onto select services that pose less risk and help reduce annual costs.
4. Analyze for anomalies-Assessments uncover anomalous cloud use, such as spikes in traffic or service types. It's important to research and understand these anomalies to understand if they pose data breach or compliance challenges.
5. Optimize your network for the best service performance -we discovered that content delivery network makes up as much as 50% of cloud service traffic for customers across every vertical. Cloud Consumption also identifies the amount of traffic associated with websites, which is often in the terabyte range. Customers can help improve network and cloud service performance by employing an intelligent WAN service targeted to optimize and better distribute this traffic.
6. Augment your private cloud -On average, our enterprise customers typically use more than 150 compute (IaaS) services. It's often more cost effective to augment/implement internal private cloud services to reduce redundant public IaaS services. Also customers should migrate workloads to the private cloud optimize risks.

Learn More

We're working with IT leaders like yourself to help establish the people, processes, and tools to better manage cloud services with Cisco Cloud Consumption Services. Learn more about how we can help you govern cloud and manage cloud risks at http://www.cisco.com/go/cloudconsumption.

Have questions about how to better manage your cloud? Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.