Cisco launches new monitoring tool called ‘Cloud Consumption as a Service’

“After using Cisco Cloud Consumption, CityMD were surprised to discover employees were using 522 cloud services, with IT only formally supporting 15-20”, Cisco said in its announcement of the new product.

That’s where Cisco Cloud Consumption as a Service comes into play. This helps IT teams to partner more effectively with business groups and make educated decision about the right cloud services for the business.

Shadow IT in enterprises is up nearly 70% from just six months ago, according to Cisco. “A lot of the partners are asking us how they can be more strategic”.

“We’ve built this tool that looks at network traffic and based upon the network traffic leaving a customer’s premise and going up into the cloud, we can understand the URLs to which they’re going, the destination IP address, and basically match that against a master data base we have that’s got thousands and thousands of cloud services and millions of websites”. That’s up to 25 times more services than the number estimated by IT managers.

According to the firm, when combined with detailed analytics, the insight the SaaS product brings will help businesses reduce security risks and better understand and manage costs.

Cisco said while CIOs estimate their organizations use an average of 91 cloud computing services, the true number averages around 1,120. “We can also proactively ensure we have the appropriate security and compliance measures in place”.

With that in mind, Cisco is betting more enterprises are looking for ways to monitor public cloud usage within their organizations.

The company’s internal analysis finds that public cloud usage has jumped 112 percent in the past year with large enterprises using an average of 1,220 individual public cloud services. “We then had the opportunity to help him identify public, private and hybrid solutions that can impact his business. I was able to show him data in the Cloud Consumption dashboard and he was amazed at services he didn’t realize he was using”, Chris Jennings, president and chief strategy officer at Aqueduct Technologies, explained in a joint statement.

Naturally, it’s a cloud service, delivered from Cisco’s own software as a service network.

Cisco is encouraging its partner community to become strategic service providers with a new Cloud Consumption-as-a-Service (CCaaS) offering sold exclusively through the channel.