Tagging and Automation

Want to see Tag Manager automation features in action? Check out these two 30-second videos.

Tagging significantly impacts your ability to create automation efficiencies across your entire cloud infrastructure. Thorough and comprehensive tagging promotes excellent tag health, the foundation for effective automations. Because many companies lack a healthy tag environment, they are unable to realize the benefits that automation confers. The lack of tagging success is widespread – as many as 86% of cloud-based companies fall short. By following best practices for tag automation, organizations achieve automation proficiency. 

Automate Tags at Deployment 

It is vitally important that tags be attached to resources at the time of deployment. Automatically doing so eliminates the risk of untagged or mistagged resources. You also prevent security gaps that occur if IAM tags are not attached to a resource until later, after the resource’s creation. Enforcement of these practices is achieved by creating tag policies that block deployment of resources unless they contain the requisite critical or essential tags. Consistent tagging across your tag environment is ensured when tags are uniformly attached to resources at their provisioning. 

Automate Tag Remediation 

Resources that are untagged or mistagged can now be corrected through automatic processes. Untagged resources can be automatically detected, triggering notifications to the owner for remediation, or triggering automatic remediation. Alerts can also notify owners that a given resource has been idle too long so they can decide how to manage the resource. Automatic alerts protect organizations from security gaps and resource disarray in their cloud environments.   

Automate Creatively 

“Automate everything” is a familiar maxim, but not every tagging application lends itself to automation. However, new use cases for tagging automations continuously evolve. One example is CI/CD pipeline tagging. Organizations frequently build continuous integration continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for software development. As scripts are updated in the pipeline there are times when you want to confirm which version of the code your current infrastructure configuration is based on. GitHub assigns a unique identity when changes occur, which is called a commit hash, that identifies the specific changes and shows the state of the git repository at that time. Tags with the updated commit hash information can be attached automatically to the affected pipeline resources, providing a quick and easy way to ascertain the current version of the pipeline infrastructure. There is no limit to creative use of tag automations. Need compels innovation. 

Automate Future Events 

Resources can be tagged to automatically trigger future actions, often with “tag it and forget it” simplicity. Resources can be tagged to schedule automatic backups and updates. They can be tagged so that after a designated period they are automatically archived, or placed in storage, with the type of storage predetermined for the best cost optimization. Resources can be tagged for automatic deletion, often after saving a snapshot, so that the resource does not continue indefinitely, unnoticed but still generating cloud expense. If a security breach occurs resources containing sensitive customer data can be tagged to shut down automatically until the breach is resolved. In short, multiple events occur automatically without manual intervention and potential human error or omission. 

Automate Multi-Cloud 

Each service provider has its own parameters for resource tags. Your user defined critical tags should be global in nature, meaning that they can be attached to resources in any cloud platform, regardless of the service provider. In this way any automations you establish will apply across all platforms so that your tagging policies will encompass every cloud provider in your multi-cloud environment. 

Automate Business Benefits 

By using automation to enrich your tagging practices, your cloud performance, or cloud automation workloads (CAW), are enhanced company wide. Automatic tagging practices enable you to go faster, saving time and money, and to scale bigger, so that you can keep up as your cloud infrastructure expands, sometimes exponentially. Tag automation augments: 

• Productivity – use your savings in time and money for greater productivity
• Reliability – with the automatic deployment of tags and the automatic events triggered by tags the same thing happens the same way every time. You can trust the outcome.
• Control – over time new people enter the workforce with different levels of knowledge. Automating tagging protects your cloud environment from divergent practices that cause resource disarray.

Automate With Tag Manager 

When seeking to follow best practices it becomes immediately apparent that tagging software is needed with features sufficiently robust to accommodate all requirements for tag proficiency. Tag Manager is that solution, devoted exclusively to providing the tools, visibility, evaluation, reporting and recommendations needed for tag excellence. Tag Manager is an innovative SaaS solution offered by CloudSaver that significantly enhances your ability to automate your tagging practice. Foundationally, it facilitates the creation of a solid and healthy tag environment, an absolute necessity for robust automation. Critical tags are attached automatically when a new resource is provisioned. Untagged resources can be identified – even legacy resources existing before migration to the cloud – and tagged for complete resource tagging and efficient automation of future events. Multi-cloud configurations are not a roadblock as automations in Tag Manager transcend diverse cloud platforms. In short, with Tag Manager your cloud resources will perform with speed and agility as multiple automation enhancements streamline your operation. 

Want to see Tag Manager automation features in action? Check out these two 30-second videos.