Snow Software on Thursday announced enhancements to its Snow Atlas platform that promise greater visibility into how IT investments impact the business, offer insights on how to optimize costs, and ultimately ensure the value of cloud-based services and containers.
The new container visibility feature was designed to offer IT teams and IT asset managers (ITAMs) details on which applications are running, how many containers are used in an environment, and how long containers have been running.
For this release, the enhancements run over Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat container apps running in Kubernetes environments. This container visibility is now available for Kubernetes environments and runs on major cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
“With large annual budgets devoted to IT spend, demonstrating return on investment for every technology purchase is vital for CIOs and IT teams,” said Sanjay Castelino, chief product and customer officer at Snow Software. “The latest release from Snow not only identifies how technology is used, but also offers use cases to support more sustainable IT practices, such as understanding the carbon footprint of devices.”
Mike Parkin, senior technical engineer at Vulcan Cyber, said that with budgets tight in IT, and visibility into container environments often being a bit hazy, these are potentially welcome tools. “As an added benefit to the IT efficiency, the improved visibility should lead to better security and a deeper understanding of the environment's risk profile,” Parkin said.
Melinda Marks, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, added that increased visibility and cost control are big issues right now.
“Cloud-native technologies make it easy to increase productivity and scale, but costs can get out of control if not managed properly,” Marks said. “We can expect more tools like this to help give centralized visibility and control to better support cloud-native development while controlling costs in this challenging economic climate.”
