CloudBolt Software this week added cost management capabilities for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure public clouds along with codeless integrations with additional platforms to its hybrid cloud management platform.

Grant Ho, chief marketing officer for CloudBolt, said the Spring Release of the company’s platform, now generally available, enables IT operations teams to rely much less on custom code to integrate the various elements of a hybrid cloud computing environment. The Spring edition adds support for the VMware vRealize Automation 8 automation platform, the configuration management database provided by ServiceNow as a cloud service and the IP address management platform from SolarWinds.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, CloudBolt is betting more organizations will look to centralize IT management as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT. The cost management capabilities added to the platform enable IT teams to position themselves as more of an independent arbiter of where certain classes of workloads should run, based on cost, at a time when organizations have never had as many options as they do today, noted Ho.

A recent survey published by CloudBolt found 80% of respondents are prioritizing real-time insight into cost optimization and security remediation. A total of 71% want self-service to be easy for end users, while 62% want an approach to integration that doesn’t require deep domain knowledge or special expertise.

A full 94% of respondents also noted hybrid cloud computing will be critical to digital transformation. A total of 92% also noted that empowering end users through self-service IT is a digital transformation accelerator, while 99% said successful automation depends on streamlining integrations.

More than three quarters (78%) noted they lack the visibility necessary to optimize cloud deployments. More than half (56%) also admitted their self-service offerings fail to meet user needs and more than three-quarters (76%) still rely on some form of custom coding when it comes to integration.

Most enterprise IT organizations are trying to strike a balance between cost and flexibility as IT environments become more distributed. Each time a new platform is added to an IT environment, the total cost of IT rises because additional consoles for managing those platforms need to be staffed. The challenge is finding a way to centralize the management of IT in a way that reduces the number of consoles that have to be mastered without requiring every business unit to standardize on a platform that locks an organization into a single provider.

It’s unclear to what degree IT organizations will rely on traditional IT service management (ITSM) platforms manned by administrators versus DevOps platforms deployed by site reliability engineers (SREs) to achieve that goal. However, one way or another, the cost of distributed computing environments needs to be reduced, even as they are becoming more complex. The primary issue now is deciding how best to achieve that goal in an IT environment where every application owner tends to view themselves as master of their own IT domain.