Enterprise cloud computing company Nutanix today announced the availability of Nutanix Beam, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that delivers multi-cloud governance so organisations can manage their spending, security and regulatory compliance across nearly any cloud platform.

Available today, Beam is based on Nutanix's recently-acquired Minjar Botmetic service, which is already used to manage more than US$1billion of cloud spend across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Essentially, it can tell businesses if they're wasting money and resources on services and applications that don't belong in the public cloud, preventing ‘runaway costs'.

Given Gartner predicts Australian public cloud spend will hit AU$4.6 billion in 2018, this could potentially save Australian organisations millions on cloud spend.

The announcement was made at .NEXT Conference 2018, held in New Orleans.

According to Gartner, “Achieving governance with cloud computing can be a daunting task.

“The nature of cloud services natively encourages users to go directly to the public cloud, resulting in cloud projects that IT may not even be aware exist.

For businesses adopting hybrid cloud architectures, this creates an unenviable scenario - managing IT costs and security across third-party cloud deployments.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud OS software helps companies reduce the complexity of their multi-cloud architectures by melding private, public and distributed clouds into a common IT operating model for their end-to-end infrastructure.

Nutanix first SaaS offering, Beam, further reduces complexity by providing customers with deep visibility and rich analytics detailing how they are using the public cloud.

It also provides one-click recommendations based on machine intelligence so IT teams can immediately optimise their cloud spend and enhance their security posture for improved compliance across clouds.

IT organisations get a clear view into the entirety of their public cloud deployments so unexpected costs and potential security gaps can be addressed before they turn into business challenges.

Beam helps organisations make better decisions when operating multi-cloud architectures.

“For us, integrity, security and compliance are of the utmost importance, especially across our multi-client, multi-technology environment with a large application landscape,” ZS Associates cloud solution architect manager Rustum Virani says.

“It was becoming a nightmare to keep track of everything. That's when we came across Nutanix Beam.

“Beam is an excellent tool that provides single pane of glass to see the state of our infrastructure, automate tasks, provide cost-saving recommendations and also generate billing reports.

Nutanix Beam customers better manage their multi-cloud deployments with:

• Cost optimisation and cloud visibility - IT teams get full visibility into their overall cloud costs. They can then optimise their spending by quickly identifying unused and underutilised resources, and select more size and cost appropriate cloud resources for each application  
• Centralised financial governance - businesses get streamlined visibility into the entire cloud footprint so IT departments can track the consumption of cloud resources by department and group, make data-driven decisions balancing IT needs and cost constraints, and enforce policies based on allocated budgets  
• Continuous cloud security and regulatory compliance - customers can define custom health check policies for compliance audits, and proactively analyse cloud security operations, while real-time scans for cloud compliance identify risks and violations