Google wants to make sure you never forget that one last one cloud task

News
By Sead Fadilpašić
published

Some cloud resources tend to be forgotten

Cloud Security
(Image credit: laymanzoom / Shutterstock)

Google has announced a new tool for its cloud computing platform which aims to cut costs for its customers. 

Unattended Project Recommender is described as a “one-stop-shop for discovering, reclaiming, and shutting down unattended cloud computing projects”.

Powered by Machine Learning (ML), Unattended Project Recommender analyzes usage activity across all projects within an organization, looking at metrics such as service accounts with authentication activity, API calls consumed, network ingress and egress, services with billable usage, active project owners, the number of active virtual machines, BigQuery jobs, and storage requests.

After analyzing all of this, Google is able to create “actionable and automatic recommendations” for the users, suggesting which projects should be terminated.

The tool can also automatically export all recommendations to BigQuery, allowing customers to investigate them with DataStudio or Looker. Connected Sheets can also be used, letting customers use Google Workspace Sheets to interact with the data stored in BigQuery, without the need to write SQL queries.

“We hope that you can leverage Unattended Project Recommender to improve your cloud security posture and reduce cost,” Google said in the announcement.

Forgotten resources

The tool should help cloud resources from being forgotten in enterprise environments, as they can sometimes be hard to find, meaning they quickly become a potential troublemaker for product teams by creating unnecessary waste.

A recent Anodot survey allegedly discovered less than a fifth (20%) of companies have the ability to quickly spot spikes in cloud costs. Furthermore, three-quarters (77%) of companies with at least $2 million in cloud costs were “often surprised” by how much money they spent on the modern infrastructure.

However, if you are worried about data privacy, the tool also allows its users to opt-out of data processing. That can be done by disabling certain groups in the “Transparency & Control” tab, in Google Cloud’s Privacy & Security settings. 

Via: VentureBeat

Sead Fadilpašić

Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.