What is Cloud Change Intelligence

Cloud environments today evolve at blazing speeds, they are complex and inter-dependent. Frequent configuration changes shape these environments on an hourly, daily or weekly basis. Cloud teams struggle to predict the impact of changes at large. As a result, managing configuration changes are challenging during development, testing, deployment and operations. Troubleshooting cloud is taxing since root cause and impact radius analysis are difficult.  

Cloud Change Intelligence (CCI) helps manage cloud configuration changes at scale. Agile cloud processes and technology enable CCI at organizations. CCI incorporates real-time contextual awareness throughout the lifecycle of cloud assets. This is key to understanding how cloud configuration changes impact cloud environments.  

In pragmatic terms, adopting CCI helps your teams understand:  

• How each configuration change modifies your posture,  
• Find the root cause and complete impact radius of incidents,  
• Detect, troubleshoot and optimize cloud environments.

Because there’s no humanly possible way your cloud team cans keep up with the growing complexity of your cloud configuration.

Cloud configuration at scale is complex and will only become more complex over time. Cloud teams struggle to design, test, review, deploy and operate complicated cloud environments at scale. Even the best teams struggle with lack of visibility, context and effective tools to tackle cloud issues.  

Some of the most senior and valuable talent spend most of their time trying to stitch together pieces of information provided by the cloud providers, observability, security and cost solutions to deliver simple tasks. Troubleshooting requires deep subject matter expertise and manual work in addition to a lack of collaborative solutions to bring all cloud teams together.  

Think about the stressful processes your teams need to go through at each availability or security incident, and how many cycles get wasted fixing easily preventable mistakes in production, development and test environments.  

CCI was born as a concept to offer a solution to these problems and more. CCI does this by democratizing access to infrastructure configuration and real-time data for the cloud. The core principle of CCI is to provide secure and flexible access to infrastructure configuration and real-time behavior data for the cloud. This includes:

1. Providing config-level visibility to engineers who work on infrastructure as code.  

2. Providing the complete context of live production environments with configuration, real-time data, across layers (e.g AWS and K8S) and accounts to engineering, Ops and security teams.  

3. Providing architectural standards that help provide guardrails for new changes, and real-time detection capabilities.  

With this new approach, your teams can save valuable cycles, foster ownership and collaborate more effectively.

Cloud environments today are magnitudes larger, more distributed, and more dynamic than on-premises environments. This scale brings complexity that outpaced the capacity of traditional tools. The result is the Cloud Execution Gap – where DevOps, SRE and SecOps teams lack the tools to efficiently detect, troubleshoot and optimize cloud environments, forcing them to work with different tools that silo data and slow them down.

Legacy and point solutions for cloud management often have limitations that can hinder their effectiveness in addressing the cost, availability, and security challenges created by configurations in modern cloud environments. These solutions are often designed for specific tasks or purposes, making them incapable of delivering a comprehensive and integrated view of the cloud infrastructure. Consequently, detecting and fixing cloud issues become troubling. Most of the legacy and point solutions use simplistic static code analysis techniques that look at the resource level and not the posture or lack critical environmental information. This lack of context causes engineers to spend unnecessary time on troubleshooting across multiple segregated tools with data silos. As an example, a change in the AWS cloud layer may impact PODs running inside your EKS cluster, most tools don’t take these dependencies into account.

In short, legacy cloud solutions are good at detecting specific incidents or conditions, but they lack:    

1. Detailed context on how and why the incident is taking place,

2. Unified collaboration capabilities for SRE, security and DevOps teams to fix these issues,  

3. Traffic and event information related to incidents for easy troubleshooting.

Adopting a CCI platform delivers two main business benefits:  

Reduced cloud risk

1. CCI reduces the number of incidents: You reduce the probability of an incident through preventative measures, thanks to tighter and scalable guardrails.  

2. CCI helps resolve incidents rapidly: You reduce the MTTR in case of an incident (availability, security), reducing the overall business risk.  

3. CCI provides unmatched visibility & context: You gain control over your cloud – your teams can now track all changes in real-time against your organizational and industry best practices, lowering your overall cloud risk.

4. CCI reduces stress and frees up cycles for your top talent: You reduce staff related risk thanks to improved employee retention and improved capabilities to attract top talent.  

Reduced cost  

1. CCI is cost-effective: You can replace expensive public cloud provider native tools and third party tools with a single platform for a fraction of the previous license cost. By consolidating tools, you also reduce the administrative overhead, along with contract management overhead.  

2. CCI lowers your cloud bill: Your teams can troubleshoot cloud cost effectively with the complete context of your environment.  

3. CCI saves your top talent time: Your teams reduce cycles required to review new configuration deployment and troubleshooting.  

4. CCI levels up the playing field for your teams: With democratized access to cloud configuration and real-time events, you can uplevel your team’s capabilities and help your junior resources deliver more value.  

You can read GigaOM CXO Decision Brief: Cloud Change Intelligence to get GigaOM’s take on CCI and how it can benefit your organization.  

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All teams that collaborate on cloud configuration changes can benefit from CCI throughout the lifecycle of cloud components.  

During the design/planning/development phase of infrastructure as code, development teams can use the visibility capabilities to get a solid understanding of the running configuration in the targeted environment.

During the test/review phase of infrastructure as code, development, architecture and security teams can use simulation capabilities to introduce guard rails and speed up reviews, along with traceable records of reviews.  

Once configuration changes are deployed, operational use cases come into play:  

1. Detect & troubleshoot availability issues in minutes

• Find the root cause of issues with the config change that caused it, the impact radius within complete real-time context of your environment.
• Simulate the proposed fix to predict the impact and assure the fix solves the issue, deploy confidently.
• Instead of root cause analysis and resolution taking hours or days for your senior engineers, your teams can fix in minutes, confidently and repeatably by all your engineers.

2. Investigate & resolve security incidents

• Find the root cause of security incidents, IAM objects involved with the complete view of cloud configuration and the context of your environment.
• Collaborate more efficiently with DevOps and SRE teams through a single platform with configuration, traffic flow and events.
• Proactively prevent incidents and non-compliant status caused by cloud misconfigurations through simulations and architectural standards.

3. Reduce operational effort, cloud and license costs

• Troubleshoot cost with direct, indirect costs and cost impact of configuration changes. Get alerts on unused resources, high cost traffic or unexpected cost increases in your environment in real-time.
• Implement best practices by using out-of-the-box cost architectural standards or create your own cost rules.
• Detect unused, idle and underutilized cloud resources.
• Reduce operational effort and license cost by consolidating multiple point solutions.

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Lightlytics offers the world’s first CCI platform, so this is an easy choice. 😀

Jokes aside, here are capabilities to look for:  

1. Support for primary public cloud provider(s).
2. Complete cloud configuration model with real-time capabilities. The solution shouldn’t rely on scheduled scans for real-time awareness and context.  
3. Role-based access control and enterprise grade security capabilities.  
4. Quick time-to-value.  
5. Easy to use.
6. No operational risk – platform needs to be completely out-of-band to prevent risk to production environments.  
7. Rich architectural rule set.
8. Customizability – architectural rules should be easily customizable by users.

Adopting a CCI platform delivers two main business benefits:  

Reduced cloud risk

1. CCI reduces the number of incidents: You reduce the probability of an incident through preventative measures, thanks to tighter and scalable guardrails.  

2. CCI helps resolve incidents rapidly: You reduce the MTTR in case of an incident (availability, security), reducing the overall business risk.  

3. CCI provides unmatched visibility & context: You gain control over your cloud – your teams can now track all changes in real-time against your organizational and industry best practices, lowering your overall cloud risk.

4. CCI reduces stress and frees up cycles for your top talent: You reduce staff related risk thanks to improved employee retention and improved capabilities to attract top talent.  

Reduced cost  

1. CCI is cost-effective: You can replace expensive public cloud provider native tools and third party tools with a single platform for a fraction of the previous license cost. By consolidating tools, you also reduce the administrative overhead, along with contract management overhead.  

2. CCI lowers your cloud bill: Your teams can troubleshoot cloud cost effectively with the complete context of your environment.  

3. CCI saves your top talent time: Your teams reduce cycles required to review new configuration deployment and troubleshooting.  

4. CCI levels up the playing field for your teams: With democratized access to cloud configuration and real-time events, you can uplevel your team’s capabilities and help your junior resources deliver more value.  

You can read the GigaOM CXO Decision Brief: Cloud Change Intelligence to get GigaOM’s take on CCI and how it can benefit your organization.  

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