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Five Tips for Getting Maximum Value from a Cloud Asset Inventory

Most organizations treat cloud asset inventories as technical projects. They invest in powerful tools, sync every possible resource, and build comprehensive dashboards. Then they wonder why adoption stays low and business value remains elusive.
The difference between cloud asset inventories that succeed and those that fail isn't technology—it's approach. Organizations that extract maximum value from their cloud inventories understand they're implementing a business capability, not just a technical solution.
In this final video of our series on designing, building, maintaining, and scaling cloud asset inventories, CloudQuery Developer Advocate Joe Karlsson sits down with AWS Partner Solutions Architect Keegan Marazzi to share five value-maximizing principles that separate successful implementations from those that stall.
Five Tips for Getting Maximum Value from a Cloud Asset Inventory

The Five Value-Maximizing Principles #

Successful cloud asset inventory programs aren't defined by technical requirements alone. They follow organizational practices that determine whether your inventory becomes an essential business tool or another abandoned data project.

1. Business Outcomes Over Technical Features #

The biggest mistake organizations make is building comprehensive cloud inventories without clear business purpose. You end up with beautifully structured data that no one uses.
The framework: Define business value before technical implementation. Don't start by asking "what can we inventory?" Start by asking "what problems can we solve?"
Implementation means:
  • Aligning inventory goals with specific business objectives
  • Are you solving compliance challenges? Cost optimization? Security governance?
  • Start with one business challenge, nail it completely, then expand
Success metric: Draw a direct line from every inventory feature to a specific business goal. If you can't connect a capability to revenue protection, cost savings, or risk reduction, don't build it.
Organizations often rush to inventory everything without understanding why. The result? A pristine dataset with no stakeholders, no use cases, and no business impact. Focus on the outcomes first.

2. Engage Stakeholders—Don't Operate in Silos #

Your cloud asset inventory isn't an IT project. It's not even just a platform engineering initiative. It's a business capability that touches FinOps, security, compliance, development, and operations teams.
Implementation means:
  • Create cross-functional teams from day one
  • Include FinOps teams, security teams, compliance teams, and platform engineering
  • These teams aren't just users—they're co-owners who define requirements and success criteria
Success metric: Track how many different teams actively access and use data from your cloud asset inventory. This could be teams querying dashboards, integrating API data into workflows, or building automation on top of inventory data.
If only one team looks at your cloud inventory data, you've built another echo chamber. True value comes from breaking down data silos and enabling organization-wide visibility.

3. Prioritize High-Impact Use Cases First #

You can have dozens of potential business outcomes to track. Don't try to solve everything at once. Find the highest-value problems and solve them completely before moving on.
What does this look like in practice?
  • Talk to different teams and leaders to understand what they care about most
  • Are you trying to reduce costs for the upcoming quarter?
  • Do you need to achieve new security and compliance protocols?
  • Are you preparing for an upcoming audit?
Implementation means:
  • Focus on use cases with immediate, measurable business impact
  • Don't boil the ocean—solve one high-value problem well
  • Win here first, establish credibility, then expand scope
Success metric: Identify clear ROI with executive visibility. Demonstrate concrete business value—cost savings identified, compliance gaps closed, security incidents prevented—before adding new capabilities.

4. Provide Actionable Intelligence, Not Just Data Collection #

Data without action is just noise. The most common failure mode for cloud inventories? Collecting massive amounts of information that teams can't act on.
The problem: Organizations build relationships between resources, make data accessible, provide beautiful visualizations—and still see no adoption. Why? Because overwhelming data without clear action paths creates paralysis, not progress.
Implementation means:
  • Integrate inventory data into workflows that enable decision-making
  • Connect your inventory to build pipelines, alerting systems, and remediation workflows
  • Enable action within the same system where users discover issues
Example: When someone finds an unencrypted database in your cloud environment, they should be able to remediate it immediately—not just report it and wait.
Your cloud asset inventory should power automation, trigger alerts, feed into CI/CD pipelines, and enable one-click remediation. Data that lives in isolation delivers no value.

5. Plan for Continuous Improvement and Scale #

Your inventory must grow as your organization evolves. New teams, new services, new applications mean new requirements. Your system should adapt instead of breaking.
The common mistake: Treating cloud asset inventory as a one-time implementation. Teams launch the system, declare victory, then watch as adoption stagnates and organizational needs evolve beyond the inventory's capabilities.
Implementation means:
  • Build for ongoing evolution, not one-time deployment
  • Establish regular review cycles for your asset inventory
  • Continuously collect feedback from primary stakeholders—business leaders, engineers, and auditors
Success metric: Your inventory adapts to organizational change. As your cloud footprint grows, new teams onboard, and business priorities shift, your inventory scales without major re-architecture.
Technology changes. Business priorities shift. Cloud environments expand. Your asset inventory should be designed for continuous adaptation, not periodic overhaul.

Critical Success Factors #

Beyond the five core principles, several critical factors determine whether your cloud asset inventory program succeeds:

Executive Sponsorship #

Get visible leadership support through all phases of building your cloud asset inventory. While grassroots efforts can identify the need and prototype solutions, sustained organizational adoption requires executive buy-in.
Leadership support helps you:
  • Secure resources and budget
  • Break down organizational silos
  • Establish clear authority for cross-functional initiatives
  • Communicate importance to all stakeholder teams

Change Management #

Technology implementation is the easy part. Organizational adoption determines success.
Invest in:
  • Comprehensive training for all stakeholder teams
  • Clear, accessible documentation
  • Regular communication about benefits and impact
  • Ongoing support and feedback mechanisms
People need to understand not just how to use your cloud asset inventory, but why it matters and how it impacts their daily work and broader business goals.

Measurement Framework #

What gets measured gets managed. Establish clear KPIs tied to business outcomes and review them regularly.
Example metrics:
  • Cost savings identified and realized
  • Security incidents prevented or accelerated
  • Compliance audit time reduced
  • Number of teams actively using inventory data
  • Time from issue discovery to remediation
Regular measurement allows you to demonstrate value, identify areas for improvement, and justify continued investment.

The Bottom Line #

Maximizing value from your cloud asset inventory requires treating it as a business capability, not just a technical project. The difference between success and failure comes down to:
  1. Business Outcomes - Focus on solving real problems, not collecting data for its own sake
  2. High-Impact Use Cases - Prioritize challenges with measurable business value
  3. No Silos - Engage stakeholders from FinOps, security, compliance, and engineering early and often
  4. Actionable Intelligence - Enable teams to act on insights, not just view them
  5. Continuous Improvement - Build systems that adapt and scale with your organization
Technology is the easy part. Organizational adoption is what ultimately determines whether your cloud asset inventory becomes an essential business tool or another abandoned data project.

Want to learn more about building effective cloud asset inventories? Check out our other resources on designing cloud asset inventories, implementing data sync workflows, and scaling infrastructure visibility across your organization.

Video Transcript #

Keegan: Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. My name is Keegan Marazzi, and I'm a Partner Solutions Architect here at AWS, where I help organizations discover, develop, and deliver solutions with partners. I'm joined here today with Joe Carlson from Cloud Query. He is a Cloud Developer Advocate. Say hi, Joe.
Joe: Hi. And yeah, let's jump into it, huh? Thanks for having me, by the way, Keegan. I appreciate it. This is our last video in our series, we've been writing about designing, building, maintaining and scaling up your cloud asset inventories. And today in this video, we're going to share five best practices we've found are that separates successful cloud asset inventory programs from ones that fail at large enterprises. So Keegan, before we get started, I just want to ask you, or I just actually, I want to tell you, did you know that most organizations implement cloud asset inventories as a technical solution? And then they wonder why adoption is slow and why no one's using it and they're not getting a lot of value out of it. Because the difference that I have found is that the companies that find successful implementations from their cloud as inventories view it as not just a technological solution, but a whole implementation approach to their business. Let's talk about our five value-maximizing principles for building under Cloud Asset Inventory. Successful Cloud Asset Inventory programs follow these core five principles. And they are just the technical requirements. They're organizational practices that we've found that determine whether your inventory is going to be a success or not.
Keegan: All right, let's jump in. Awesome. Awesome. So we're going to start at the top here. The first business principle, the first principle we're going to talk about is business outcomes and not technical features. So here's the framework. We want to define business value before we have any kind of technical implementation. And we don't want to start by asking what can we inventory? What can we query? We want to ask what problems and what challenges can we solve? regarding our organization and our cloud infrastructure. So implementation means aligning inventory goals with business objectives. So are you solving compliance challenges? Is it cost optimization or security governance? You should always start at 1.1 business challenge, nail it and then expand. So your success metric should be to inventory decisions directly to a business goal if you can't draw a line from a specific feature of an inventory of asset inventory to a specific goal like Revenue protection cost saving or risk reduction then you shouldn't really be focusing on building it. Now, the biggest mistake that we see is building a comprehensive inventory without a clear business purpose. So you end up with a really nice, clean set of data, but you don't really have a use for it and you ask yourself why your engineers and your business management aren't really using the solution that you've built. So it really comes down to focusing on the business outcomes, what challenges you're trying to solve before just trying to get every single asset inside of your inventory.
Joe: Keegan, I think that's good evergreen advice for anybody. If you're building on a tool internally, if you don't have core metrics and outcomes you're looking for, it's probably not gonna work out too well for you. But okay, cool, let's move on. Principle number two, make sure you're constantly and consistently engaging all stack stakeholders, excuse me, and try not to operate in silos for the data. So this is really about creating cross-functional teams that can get involvement from all different areas of the business. This isn't just an IT project. This isn't just a platform engineering project. It's a business capability that touches every aspect of the team. And by implementation teams here, I'm talking about things like FinOps teams, security teams, compliance teams, as well as like development and platform engineering teams that you want to make sure you're engaging them from day one. They're not just the users. You want them to feel like co-owners who help define the requirements for successful criteria for building out your cloud asset inventory. And I love tying these principles to KPIs that you can utilize to make sure they're going to be useful. But a successful metric I've seen is tracking the number of teams that are actively using or accessing data from your cloud asset inventory. This could be even things like, How many people on different teams are accessing a dashboard built using this or directly accessing integrating that API data into different workflows? If only one team is looking at that data, you've just built another echo chamber.
Keegan: Yeah, and no one wants that. Nope. which brings us to our third principle, which is to prioritize high impact use cases first. So we already focused on having to write business outcomes and not to silo your data. But what do we mean by high impact use cases? It's those with immediate measurable business impacts, right? We know that you can have a lot of different business outcomes you need to track, but we don't want you to boil the ocean. You want to find the highest value problems and solve them completely before moving on. So what does this look like in terms of practice? It means figuring out by talking to different teams and leaders in your organization and figure out what they care about and what needs to be handled at the highest priority. So are you trying to optimize and reduce your costs for the upcoming quarter? Do you want to try to get some new security and compliance protocols achieved in your organization? Or do you even need to prepare for an upcoming audit? All of these are questions you should be asking and prioritizing before you go and set out to create your asset inventory or even modify an existing one. You always want to focus on identifying the ROI and having clear executive visibility. So we want to win here first and then we want to expand our scope, which takes us on to our fourth principle.
Joe: So we want to be able to provide actionable intelligence, not data collection. I think that this is something that can commonly happen, right? You just build those data, you build these relationships, you make it accessible, and no one uses it. And the problem is that it's just, it can be overwhelming, right? So starting those use cases is going to help direct that funnel, that hose of information to solving a real problem. But you want to make sure you're providing in a way that actually solves actionable intelligence. So that means you can integrate the data and build workflows that'll help enable decision making and making actions by your cloud writer, either on costs or security, whatever. But the data is useless if people can't act on it within the same system. Implementation here means connecting the inventory to build pipelines, alerting remediation steps or workflows for optimizing and governing your cloud. So when someone finds an unencrypted database within your cloud, they should be able to remediate it immediately, not just report it. Awesome.
Keegan: Yeah. Having the ability to act on it and to measure the insights is extremely important. And that brings us to our final principle, which is to plan for continuous improvement and scale. So as we mentioned earlier in other videos, your inventory should be built to grow as your organization does. So new teams, new services, new apps, mean new requirements and that your system should be able to adapt to them instead of breaking. So the common mistake that we see is that treating your inventory as a one-time implementation rather than an ongoing program. So you want to launch, declare your victory, then watch adoption change and be able to adapt to that as your organizations need to evolve. You should have regular review cycles of your asset inventory. and always collect feedback from your primary stakeholders, whether that's business leaders, engineers, or auditors that come and collect the data that you need. So Joe, do you want to talk about some critical success factors that go alongside these main value propositions?
Joe: Yeah, just think of these like a speed round. These are just some tips that I've seen that I'd love to just pass on to you from trying to get the most value out of your cloud asset inventory. So first one, executive sponsorship. Again, evergreen advice. Make sure that you get visible leadership support through all phases of building out your cloud asset inventory. I think it can start as a grassroots effort if you see this as a need and you're solving this problem. But making sure that you get buy-in from leadership is going to really help you find maximum value from that in the long run. Also, change management is really huge too. I find that like getting value from this and if you really want to try to get people to utilize it, having training, having great documentation, communicating clearly and often about people who are going to be consuming data from this is really going to be key. People that want need to understand not just how to use a system, but they need to understand why it matters and how it impacts their daily work and the business. And finally, too, I try to include little KPIs I like that tied to all these different business outcomes. But I think a measurement framework with clear KPIs and a regular review process for those KPIs can be really important for continued success. Remember, what gets measured gets managed. Technology here is the easy part. Organizational adoption is what's going to ultimately determine success for your cloud asset inventory.
Keegan: Yeah, those are great tips, Joe. So just to give a recap on what we've discussed today and kind of the value proposition that we want to bring by this video series is to maximize inventory value as treating it as a business capability, not necessarily a technical project that gets checked off the list. So in order to recap on these steps, we have at the top business outcomes to focus on. What are the goals of the company? What are the goals of the organization and focus on them rather than getting absolutely everything under the sun measured? Second, we have high impact use cases, right? So we want to talk to our leadership and understand what are the highest impact, highest necessity items that we need to track and organize in order to make sure that our cloud asset inventory is up to date and focused on the right objectives. Next, we have no silos, right? So we want to ensure that we involve all stakeholders from all different parts of the team. So things like FinOps teams, the security teams, and engineering teams early on in the process as we make this asset inventory. Fourth, we want to focus on actionable intelligence, right? So we want to make sure that we're able to act on the data that we receive from this inventory, right? We want to make sure that we're not just getting data that we look at and just say OK to. We want to say, this needs to get better. This needs to be changed. We need to act on this. And finally, we want to make sure that we can always have continuous improvement. Times change, technologies change, cloud asset inventories also change. So we want to make sure to always be able to leave that room to adapt, to be able to evolve quickly. And that summarizes the cloud inventory value. That's what you can get from it if you build it correctly. That's it. Keegan, thanks for having me. That's been a blast. Thank you so much. Until next time. Till next time.

FAQ #

Q: How do I get executive buy-in for a cloud asset inventory program?
A: Start with a single, high-impact business problem that resonates with leadership—usually cost optimization, security risk, or compliance challenges. Build a pilot that demonstrates measurable results (dollars saved, risks mitigated, audit time reduced), then present those outcomes to secure broader support. Focus your pitch on business value, not technical capabilities.
Q: What's the difference between a cloud asset inventory and CMDB?
A: Traditional CMDBs focus on configuration management and change control, often requiring manual updates and governance processes. Modern cloud asset inventories automatically sync real-time infrastructure state across multiple cloud providers. Cloud inventories excel at discovering actual running resources, tracking ephemeral infrastructure, and providing current visibility—while CMDBs traditionally focus on intended state and change management workflows.
Q: Which teams should be involved in cloud asset inventory implementation?
A: At minimum, include representatives from platform engineering/DevOps, security, FinOps/finance, compliance, and application development teams. Each brings essential perspectives: platform engineering understands infrastructure, security defines risk requirements, FinOps identifies cost optimization opportunities, compliance knows regulatory needs, and developers understand application dependencies. The specific teams depend on your primary use cases.
Q: How long does it take to implement a cloud asset inventory?
A: Technical implementation can take weeks—syncing your first cloud provider and setting up basic queries. But achieving organizational adoption and business value takes months. Plan for 3-6 months to implement your first high-impact use case, demonstrate value, and build stakeholder confidence. Then expand iteratively rather than trying to solve everything at once.
Q: What metrics should I track to measure cloud asset inventory success?
A: Align metrics with your business outcomes. For cost optimization: dollars identified and saved. For security: risks discovered, mean time to remediation. For compliance: audit preparation time, policy violations detected. Also track adoption metrics: number of teams using the system, queries run per week, automation workflows built on inventory data. Choose 3-5 KPIs that directly tie to your primary business objectives.
Q: Should I build or buy a cloud asset inventory solution?
A: Most organizations should leverage existing solutions rather than building from scratch. Open-source options like CloudQuery provide extensive plugin ecosystems, proven sync reliability, and active communities. Building custom inventory systems diverts engineering resources from business-critical work and requires ongoing maintenance. Unless you have unique requirements that no existing solution addresses, start with proven tools and customize as needed.
Q: How do I handle multi-cloud asset inventory?
A: Choose a cloud-agnostic inventory platform that supports multiple providers. Establish consistent data models and normalization across clouds so teams can write queries that work regardless of whether resources live in AWS, Azure, GCP, or elsewhere. Start with your largest cloud footprint, prove value, then expand to additional providers. Avoid building provider-specific inventory silos.
Q: What's the biggest mistake organizations make with cloud asset inventories?
A: Building comprehensive data collection without defining clear use cases or business outcomes. Organizations sync every possible resource type, create elaborate dashboards, and wonder why no one uses the system. Start with specific business problems, solve them well, demonstrate value, then expand. Technology without organizational adoption delivers zero value.
Q: How often should cloud asset inventory data be updated?
A: It depends on your use cases. Security and compliance often require real-time or near-real-time data (syncing every 5-15 minutes). Cost optimization can work with daily or weekly syncs. Start with hourly syncs as a baseline, then adjust based on stakeholder needs and system performance. More frequent syncs increase infrastructure costs, so balance freshness against value.

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