The demand for cloud infrastructure soars as the IT industry grows, increasing the complexity of asset tracking and managing resources. Platform, DevOps and SRE engineers are essential in managing these environments, optimizing operations, and planning for the future.

According to Gartner, by 2025, over 90% of breaches in the cloud will have a root cause of preventable misconfigurations or mistakes by end users.

But by bringing asset management principles into the modern cloud era with cloud asset management, cloud practitioners are introduced to a better way to prevent those issues. Think: a way to provision, manage, govern, and control their infrastructure — even in a multi-cloud and multi-IaC world.

Here's why cloud asset management is a game-changer for modern engineering teams.

What Most Teams Get Wrong: Cloud Asset Management Edition

Cloud providers like AWS and Google prioritize data protection, but organizations remain responsible for continuous security improvements. The cloud's dynamic nature makes it challenging for security teams to track and protect all assets. Without a precise inventory, especially across multiple providers, identifying and addressing vulnerabilities becomes challenging.

For example, if multiple team members deploy cloud resources independently, maintaining a precise inventory of the resources becomes challenging, compromising security principles, cost optimization, and security measures.

Here are some of the challenges faced by teams struggling with cloud asset management:

• No or Low Visibility Across a Dynamic and Distributed Cloud Environment: Cloud environments continually change, with new assets being provisioned and decommissioned regularly. This continuous change makes it difficult to track all assets. For example, In a hybrid cloud environment, different teams may use AWS, Azure, or GCP, requiring different tools for insights. Usually, no single tool offers a unified multi-cloud dashboard, making it challenging to maintain a comprehensive inventory. As a result, PowerShell/Bash scripts are often used, or the task is done manually.

• Lack of Integration Between Cloud Security Tools: Many public cloud security tools, such as Qualys, Trend Micro, AWS Security Hub, etc., cannot integrate seamlessly with one another. This can make obtaining a comprehensive view of the security posture difficult, making it challenging to respond to threats effectively.

• Inconsistent Tags When Provisioning New Cloud Resources: Without a proper tag management system, determining ownership, usage, and maintenance of cloud resources is challenging. Inconsistent tagging complicates cloud cost management and accountability. For example, one team might tag a virtual machine as "Environment: Production," while another uses "Prod," and some resources might lack tags altogether. This inconsistency hinders resource tracking, complicates security, and makes generating detailed billing reports difficult, leading to potential oversights in cost allocation and resource optimization.

• Access Control and Tracking Issues: IaC tools simplify cloud resource provisioning, but this ease complicates monitoring user activities and tracking resource changes. An RBAC policy governing what can be provisioned and what is off-limits based on user roles is essential. For example, discrepancies arise if a DevOps engineer inventories cloud assets for cost planning, but someone changes the instance size of five VMs without updating the IaC code. 

The Most Impactful Benefits of Cloud Asset Management

Cloud asset management may not be easy to get right, but it will certainly pay off for the teams that do. Embracing CAM can spell big ROI, plus provide:

• Centralized Cloud Asset Inventory: The primary benefit of tracking cloud assets is achieving complete visibility of all resources that deliver cloud services. This comprehensive view enables accurate asset lifecycle management, ensuring that assets are efficiently monitored, maintained, and optimized throughout their lifespan. For example, the system aggregates data from AWS EC2 instances, Azure VMs, and Google Cloud Compute Instances into a single dashboard, allowing IT administrators to view all compute resources, monitor their statuses, and ensure proper tagging and usage.
  
  With cloud asset inventory, you can meticulously catalog every virtual machine, database, storage bucket, and network component across your entire cloud infrastructure. But a robust cloud asset inventory solution doesn't just list your resources; it provides a wealth of information about each asset:
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  • Resource type and specifications
  • Creation date and last modified timestamp
  • Associated tags and metadata
  • Ownership and access permissions
  • Cost and usage metrics
  • Relationships and dependencies with other assets
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  This detailed information is crucial for making informed decisions about resource allocation, security measures, and cost management strategies.

• Cost Efficiency and Scalability: Cloud-based asset management minimizes initial capital expenditures by reducing upfront infrastructure maintenance costs and provides a flexible scaling based on actual usage, ensuring cost efficiency and adaptability. For example, an e-commerce website is experiencing high traffic during a flash sale. To handle the surge, the site uses on-demand scaling with a cloud provider like AWS. As traffic spikes, additional servers (EC2 instances) automatically launch to manage the increased load. After the sale, when traffic drops, the extra servers are terminated.

• Control and Security: Understanding and carefully managing cloud assets is crucial for ensuring robust security. By gaining a thorough knowledge of their inventory, organizations can make well-informed decisions on security measures, enhancing their overall security posture. For example, a financial services company that stores sensitive customer data on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. To ensure robust security, they need a clear list of the assets and their configuration.

• Mitigated Misconfigurations: Addressing gaps in misconfigurations or vulnerabilities is complex. Organizations should implement processes for continuously monitoring and identifying misconfigurations in workloads to maintain a secure environment. A few examples of misconfigurations in cloud resources include opening critical ports such as database ports, SSH ports, RDP ports, etc., to the internet without restricting IPs, publicly accessible S3 buckets, or granting excessive permissions to IAM policies.

How Does Firefly Help Tackle the Cloud Asset Management's Toughest Challenges?

Firefly makes it possible for cloud teams to (re)discover their entire cloud landscape and manage it more efficiently and consistently as a single inventory across multi-cloud, multi-accounts, and Kubernetes deployments. At the same time, it empowers DevOps to ramp Infrastructure-as-Code up quickly and to create and deploy cloud infrastructure safely and consistently within organizational policies.

Firefly is a Cloud Asset Management Platform that helps DevOps, Platform Engineering, and SRE teams streamline their cloud management using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), which reduces cloud complexity, enhances asset efficiency, and builds a reliable platform. By turning any cloud into IaC, Firefly ensures that every change to the cloud aligns with industry standards and best practices, empowering teams to maintain control and cloud compliance effortlessly.

📹 Watch and learn how Firefly solves for cloud complexity ↓

Firefly supports cloud service providers like AWS, GCP, K8s Clusters, DataDog, GitHub, Akamai, Okta, Terraform, Pulumi, and more, making it an effective cloud asset management system for most of the cloud landscape.

How can you explore and discover your cloud asset inventory with Firefly?

Firefly helps you control your entire multi-cloud footprint. The Firefly dashboard shows all the providers and provides a view of your cloud assets and your Infrastructure-as-Code in one place.

Components that you can use

• Inventory Filter - In the inventory tab, you can easily filter your cloud footprint using these parameters, some text
  • Data source - Integrated service provider
  • Location - Region, Namespace (K8s)
  • Asset Type - Type of service or object provided
  • Tags - Label created in your cloud provider
  • Owner - Owner of the asset
  • IaC Type - Type of IaC tool
  • Creation Year - The year the asset was created
  • Governance Policies- Policies that improve the configuration
  • Excluded Assets - Resources that are excluded from the inventory
  • Deleted Assets - Resources that no longer exist in your cloud

• Asset Category - You can filter the current asset list based on the liveliness and types of different resources.

• Inventory table - This table displays your cloud assets and the filters that impact them.

• Bring the assets to IaC - Firefly scans your IaC state files to determine which parts of the cloud are codified, drifted, or unmanaged. Then, you can generate code to turn unmanaged resources and configuration drifts into managed cloud asset inventory, described as code.

The list of codified, drifted, and unmanaged assets can be seen in the inventory tab.

How can you Code and manage unmanaged assets using Firefly?

1. In the inventory tab, click on unmanaged resources to get the list of all unmanaged resources.

2. Select the unmanaged resource you want to manage using the IaC and click the codify button.

3. The Codify button will generate an IaC code for the selected resource for various IaC tools like Terraform, Open Tofu, pulumi, etc. Select the IaC of your choice. We will use terraform here. Copy the code and run it against your state file. Firefly also considers any dependency attached to the resource and can generate code for those.

4. Once the IaC code is run, head back to the inventory. You will observe that the asset is listed under a codified category. This means the asset is now being controlled by an IaC tool and managed by Firefly.

How do you manage drifted configuration of managed assets with Firefly?

Firefly tracks any drift between the desired and the real state of all the managed resources. For example, SRE created an EC2 machine with t2.small size using Terraform, but then, due to a requirement, upgraded to t2.large size using AWS console. This will create a difference between the actual state and the desired state. Firefly identifies this change and shows it as a drifted resource. Using the similar steps we followed above to codify an unmanaged asset, you can manage the drifted resource also.

On the dashboard tab, we can see the complete IaC coverage of our multi-cloud footprint.

How does Firefly handle cloud governance?

Firefly has built-in OPA policies, or you can create your own to enhance asset configurations and boost cloud services' performance, functionality, and security.

Firefly categorizes policies into three types:

• Misconfiguration - Reduces the attack surface and increases security
• Optimization - Reduces cloud spending and eliminates waste
• Reliability - Increases reliability, throughput, performance, and eliminate the risk of downtime

You can see the built-in and custom policies under the Governance tab.

Manage Notifications

Using Firefly, you can receive notifications about the changes in the state or configuration of your assets and new policy violation subscriptions.

How do you move workloads across a multi-cloud environment?

Firefly simplifies the cloud migration process. Users can choose their existing cloud assets, like AWS EC2 instances. Firefly will generate the corresponding Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for Azure or Google Cloud VM. This ensures that the source cloud configurations are accurately mirrored in the target cloud, maintaining operational consistency.

For example, using Firefly, you can select the cloud service for which you want to generate the IaC.

1. From the inventory tab, select the resource you want to move to a different cloud and click on codify.
2. You will see the cloud migration option on the left in the codify dialogue box.

3. Select the destination cloud, and you will get the IaC code for the equivalent service in that cloud.

4. Run the generated code to create the resource in the destination cloud.

Cloud Asset Management: FAQs

Q1: What is cloud asset management?

Cloud asset management brings asset management concepts into the modern cloud era. It involves tracking, managing, and optimizing cloud resources and services across various environments to ensure efficient use, cost savings, and enhanced security.

Q2: Why is cloud asset management important?

It provides visibility into cloud resources, helps control costs, ensures compliance with security policies, and enhances operational efficiency by preventing resource sprawl and underutilization.

Q3: What is the role of tagging in cloud asset management?

Tagging helps organize and categorize cloud resources, making it easier to track ownership, usage, and costs. Consistent tagging practices are crucial for proper management and reporting.

Q4: How can Firefly assist with cloud asset management?

Firefly, a cloud-based asset management software, simplifies the process by generating Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) for cloud assets, maintaining asset history, providing a centralized inventory across cloud providers and IaCs, and offering tools for monitoring and optimizing resource usage.