There are at least two things CIOs want. They want to use their iPads to do their jobs and they really want to get a grip on what’s going on in their companies’ Amazon cloud deployments. Now, Newvem — one of a flock of startups that help customers better manage their Amazon services — hopes to capture that audience with a new native iOS app.
Newvem says its new Cloud Smart Meter – used in conjunction with Newvem Analytics on the back end — will help customers visualize how their AWS costs are trending, assess risks and assets. Newvem uses the customer’s AWS credentials to get a view of what’s really happening inside the customer’s Amazon cloud.
Newvem Analytics analyzes AWS cloud usage and helps IT managers identify issues, including perhaps unexpected trends in their costs and inventory. This attacks a big problem: the beauty of Amazon’s EC2 compute and S3 storage services is that they’re easy to buy and spin up, the downside of EC2 and S3 is they’re easy to buy and spin up. Because developers typically use personal credit cards and then expense the costs, it’s hard for IT to get a real picture of Amazon spending. CIOs view this activity as “shadow IT” beyond their purview and they don’t like it much. Still, smart managers realize that the horse is out of the barn and the best thing to do is find out what services are being used and keep tabs on them. That way they can eliminate services that may have been paid for, but are not being used, and consolidate them.
Tools like Newvem’s and others from Cloudyn, Cloudability and other startups help on this front. Meanwhile incumbent companies like Rightscale are adding more tools to help companies better forecast and plan their cloud computing deployments.
Newvem’s new tool is free and will be available on iTunes on Monday.
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