Lost and Found: Are Your Apps Cost Effective?

The growth of cloud services, apps, and associated tools continues at a rapid pace. But a swift digital migration to cloud has likely created blind spots in your deployment landscape, increasing unknown risks. Each organization owns app data and IP—whether seen or unseen—and bears responsibility in tracking health and status. If a cloud app is compromised with an attack that steals data but the app is unknown, the company is still required to account for lack of oversight—and is similarly exposed to brand damage along with possible regulatory fines.

With apps residing on-premises, you may have an understanding of where they all are or at least how to find them if asked. But with a move to cloud-native apps and migration to cloud deployments, do you know where all your apps are across multi-cloud environments? In addition, the growth of ‘shadow IT’ for app services has blinded most IT professionals when it comes to the location of all their apps deployed. The health and status of those apps—and whether or not they are protected or exposed—remains of paramount importance.

At F5, we spend a significant amount of time talking to organizations about their app scale, security, and CI/CD pipelines across any environment they are using to provide the best user experience. Even with otherwise good application visibility, though, many are blind to a portion of their deployments across hybrid cloud.

That’s why we created F5 Beacon, an app visibility and analytics SaaS solution to integrate with all your siloed app services and bring you a single pane of glass with actionable insights to make better informed decisions.

In our previous blogs on Beacon, we provided some highlights into the health and performance of applications. Once they’re found through API-level integration with app services solutions, it’s easy to flow app data into Beacon for discovery and to visualize your app landscape in dashboards and status views.

In addition to understanding your app landscape with visibility, we include Cost, Operations, and Security Insights with every Beacon SaaS registration. For example an AWS Cost Insight on our GitHub repo is one of the examples which fall under the Cost Category. Using AWS Lambda, it can directly be imported into F5 Beacon’s Insights View. Here you see the monthly app cost in AWS Cloud incurred:

One critical question of managers and especially Finance leaders is: what are the cloud costs across all of our app development, test, and production? Beacon Insights provide clear direction to understand your costs, security, and operations for forecasting and trending what’s working and where improvement is required.

F5 Beacon helps app owners, managers, leaders, and Execs across the organization gain visibility and intelligence about their app deployments including monthly cloud costs.

To learn more about F5 Beacon and take advantage of the 45-day free trial, visit https://f5.com/beacon-get-started.