Cloud VMs offer unmatched speed, scale and flexibility – all of which could eventually count for little if they’re left to fend for themselves

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched Simple Storage Service (S3). A few months later, the company’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service opened for public beta testing before rolling out officially in 2008. These events sparked the era of modern on-demand cloud storage and computing that changed how organizations of all sizes think about their IT infrastructure.

Fast-forward to the present and you would be hard-pressed to find many organizations that haven’t ‘lifted and shifted’ at least part of their workloads to the cloud, or aren’t planning to do so soon. Indeed, some now run entirely in the cloud, while many others have paired cloud workloads, often in multi-cloud setups, with on-prem resources that won’t be retired anytime soon.

Of all the things that these organizations have in common, one warrants a closer look: virtual machine (VM) sprawl, or uncontrolled growth ...