Through a Software-as-a-Service model, CloudHealth acts as a management layer that integrates with products such as Chef, Ansible and StackDriver, aggregating them all into a single pane of glass, adding integrated reporting and active policy management, and making it possible to express rules easily.

This week, CloudHealth will update its software with features that introduce more complex and expressive policies, Kinsella told IT Best of Breed.

The new release adds policy-driven rightsizing to avoid wasting provisioned resources, per-instance cost measures that offer cost and usage policies targeting individual instances, and perspective-driven policies that can evaluate groups of instances.

It also adds automation capabilities, including email alerting and stopping, starting and rebooting instances.

Such capabilities give VARs that are focused on cloud services an opportunity to add value by building out and introducing to customers custom policies that can optimize their cloud usage and reduce their costs, Kinsella said.

Peter Cridland, cloud leader at Cloudreach, a U.K.-based global cloud broker that partners with CloudHealth, told IT Best of Breed that a policy-based management approach is the only way to counter an erosion in accountability that's resulting from unrestrained scale.

Cridland, who focuses on cloud governance and compliance, said that in the pre-cloud days, procurement mechanisms were fairly straightforward, involving centralized budgets and simple requests for resources, he said. That’s very different from the procurement of cloud resources, which comes from diverse, decentralized sources, resulting in rapid, disorderly scaling.

"With the dawn of cloud computing, particularly public cloud, that environment has very much been turned on its head," Cridland told IT Best of Breed.

Cloud is "an amazing enabler, but scalability cuts both ways," he said. "Things can also scale uncontrollably. Customers find themselves dealing with rapidly scaling environments and not knowing exactly what they’ve got hold of."

That creates security, compliance and cost management issues. And at the heart of all those issues is less accountability.

"The challenge that organizations find is to get a picture of what is running out there, to map that to business functions, to accountable individuals, then start putting in place controls to manage costs, security, compliance," Cridland explained.

CloudHealth's new features are an important step toward addressing those challenges, he said.

The new perspective system makes it straightforward for customers to target a defined set of cloud resources based on multiple criteria, and provides detailed visualizations of cost and usage metrics targeted to the right individuals within the business.

Enabling different policy rules based on perspective groups, and allowing multiple criteria to be evaluated by a single rule make it possible for Cloudreach and its customers to build powerful reporting and automation workflows without API access and complex scripting, he said.

The per-instance targeting, coupled with automation rules that can alert accountable individuals to security or compliance issues, or potential cost-saving measures, enable workflows that can "cut out the middle man and ensure that those best able to effect the required changes to a resource are given direct access to the information they need."

Those innovations, taken together, will accelerate Cloudreach's delivery of best-practice monitoring and workflow automation, Cridland said, and empower customers to evaluate, modify and extend those policies directly.