For organizations that use public cloud services, the biggest goal is to optimize the usage and spend of those services. It all comes back to cost management and control–it’s all too easy to lose control of your cloud spend, especially when you don’t know who is spinning up more servers or whether they’re being used in the most cost-effective way. CIOs are experimenting with server tagging as a way to overcome this challenge. What is server tagging? Essentially, it’s creating a name and a value for each VM you have in your cloud environment. Examples of server tagging include by geographic region, department, application, server role (web server, database) or environment (production, QA). You can assign multiple tags if you wish to further specify who is using which servers (but note that this is not always possible). You can also set up rules to tag servers within a timely fashion or destroy them otherwise, eliminating the risk that tags won’t be implemented. With the information gathered from server tags, you can develop more meaningful financial and usage reports to present to your boss or board of directors. Why server tagging Server tagging is important because it gives you back control over…
