Asset Management
Best Cloud Asset Management Software - Top 7 Solutions in 2026
What Is Cloud Asset Management Software? #
Cloud asset management software is a category of IT solutions built to track, manage, and optimize assets across multiple cloud environments. These platforms provide a centralized dashboard to inventory cloud services, virtual machines, storage, software licenses, and other resources used by an organization.
By automating the process of asset discovery and documentation, cloud asset management software helps organizations keep pace with the complexity of modern, multi-cloud infrastructure. This software is distinct from traditional IT asset management tools because it handles the dynamic and ephemeral nature of cloud resources.
Assets in cloud environments can be rapidly created, destroyed, or modified, making manual tracking unreliable. Cloud asset management platforms use integrations and APIs to maintain accurate, near real-time records of all assets, their configurations, and usage patterns across public, private, and hybrid clouds. This visibility is essential for compliance, governance, and cost control.
This is part of a series of articles about cloud asset inventory.
In this article:
Key Benefits of Cloud Asset Management #
Cloud asset management software provides organizations with critical visibility and control over their cloud environments. By automating discovery, tracking, and governance, these tools help eliminate inefficiencies and improve overall cloud operations.
Here are the key benefits:
- Improved visibility across cloud environments: Gain centralized insight into all assets across public, private, and hybrid clouds. This helps eliminate shadow IT and ensures teams know exactly what is running and where.
- Stronger cost control and optimization: Identify underused or idle resources, prevent budget overruns, and enable chargeback or showback models. Real-time cost tracking leads to more informed decisions and reduced waste.
- Faster compliance and audit readiness: Maintain accurate, auditable records of all assets and changes. This supports internal governance, regulatory compliance, and simplifies external audits.
- Reduced security risks: Enforce access controls and monitor changes to detect misconfigurations or unauthorized usage. Asset-level security tracking helps close gaps in cloud security posture.
- Operational efficiency: Automate repetitive asset management tasks, integrate with existing ITSM and DevOps tools, and reduce time spent on manual tracking. This allows IT teams to focus on higher-value work.
- Better vendor and license management: Monitor license usage and contract terms across cloud services. Proactively manage renewals, avoid overages, and simplify vendor relationships.
Core Features of Cloud Asset Management Software #
Cloud asset management solutions typically include the following capabilities.
Asset Discovery and Inventory #
Asset discovery and inventory features allow organizations to automatically identify and document every cloud asset in use. These tools connect to various cloud service providers via APIs, scanning resources such as virtual machines, storage volumes, databases, and SaaS applications.
Automated discovery eliminates the risk of overlooking assets, especially in dynamic environments where resources are frequently created or destroyed. Maintaining an accurate inventory serves as the foundation for effective asset management. Up-to-date information on each asset’s status, configuration, and lifecycle stage enables IT teams to prevent duplication, reduce unnecessary spending, and quickly identify orphaned or underutilized resources.
License and Contract Management #
Cloud asset management solutions often include modules for tracking licenses and managing third-party contracts. These features help organizations monitor their usage of paid cloud services and SaaS applications, ensuring that software licensing agreements and contract terms are not violated.
The software can alert IT teams when licenses are nearing expiration or when users exceed allotted entitlements. Proactive management of licenses and contracts can yield substantial cost savings. By eliminating redundant subscriptions, preventing unintentional overages, and ensuring discounts are applied when available, organizations can control spend and maintain better vendor relationships.
Usage Monitoring and Cost Tracking #
Effective usage monitoring entails continuously tracking how cloud assets are being utilized throughout their lifecycle. Cloud asset management tools collect and aggregate data on resource consumption, user access patterns, and workload performance. Clear reporting and dashboards make it easy to spot inefficient or idle resources, identifying opportunities for consolidation or decommissioning.
Cost tracking features break down spending by project, department, or user, offering granular visibility into overall cloud expenses. By associating costs with specific assets, organizations can implement chargeback or showback models to promote accountability and cost optimization. Alerts and forecasts based on usage data further help prevent budget overruns and improve planning.
Integration with ITSM and DevOps tools #
Modern cloud asset management software is designed to integrate seamlessly with IT service management (ITSM) and DevOps tools. These integrations permit asset data to flow into help desk systems, change management workflows, and CI/CD pipelines, helping IT and engineering teams work more efficiently. For example, asset information can automate ticket assignments or trigger approval workflows for provisioning new resources.
By connecting with DevOps platforms, cloud asset data can inform deployment decisions, track infrastructure as code changes, and enable automated policy enforcement throughout the development lifecycle. Integrations enable collaboration between operations, security, and developer teams, improving governance when managing cloud resources.
Security and access control #
Security and access control capabilities help ensure that only authorized users can view or manipulate cloud assets. Cloud asset management tools often include role-based access control (RBAC), audit trails, and policy enforcement features. These functions make it straightforward to grant, revoke, or modify user permissions in accordance with organizational security policies.
In addition, comprehensive logging of changes and access events improves visibility for auditors and security teams. Real-time monitoring can detect suspicious activity, flag policy violations, and enable rapid incident response. By maintaining tight control over asset access, organizations reduce the risk of breaches, privilege abuse, and misconfigurations in the cloud.
Notable Cloud Asset Management Software #
1. CloudQuery #
CloudQuery offers deep support for multiple cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, GCP and several other cloud and SaaS platforms. Using its CLI option, means you can send data from these platforms to the service of your choice in order to create logs, reports and dashboards highlighting important cloud information.
Key features include
- Local deployment support CloudQuery CLI allows you to run your cloud asset management software entirely on your own systems, meaning no sensitive information leaves your own infrastructure and giving you complete flexibility and control over how the data is used and presented.
- Flexible API CloudQuery allows you to pull information from any source. Its library of source plugins means that over 70 services are supported out of the box, with regular updates to expand table coverage and improve security. Additionally, the CloudQuery API allows users to write their own integrations to sync data from other tools.
- In-built reports The CloudQuery SaaS platform includes a number of pre-built reports that answer common questions about cloud platforms. This makes it easy for users to quickly identify security concerns, cost overruns and opportunities to reduce expenditure.
- SQL and natural language support Unlike other tools, CloudQuery doesn't have a bespoke querying language. Queries can be created using SQL or questions about your cloud assets can be asked using natural language, massively reducing the time required to create reports.
ServiceNow Cloud Asset Inventory #
ServiceNow Cloud Asset Inventory discovers Google Cloud resources and policies using the Cloud Asset Inventory API, updating the CMDB with collected metadata and relationships through pattern-based discovery.
Key features include:
- Pattern-based GCP discovery: Uses an enhanced Asset Inventory pattern to query configurations and trigger discovery based on configured launcher parameters or MID Server properties.
- Serverless and cloud discovery: Supports Serverless discovery schedules and Cloud Discovery by accounts or defaults, minimizing manual schedule configuration across projects.
- Inclusion list controls: Fine-tunes coverage with a Cloud Inventory Resource Inclusion List, avoiding duplicate discovery when custom patterns already exist.
- CMDB population: Writes inventory into CMDB tables, including resource identifiers, types, and tags, with dependency views linking accounts and logical datacenters.
- Scoped prerequisites and access: Requires Store app updates, appropriate IAM permissions, and storage bucket access for exportAssets and inventory file processing.
3. Turbot (Steampipe) #
Turbot Pipes with Steampipe exposes cloud and SaaS APIs as SQL tables for instant querying, with options for Postgres FDW, SQLite extension, and standalone export utilities.
Key features include:
- Zero-ETL SQL access: Query cloud APIs using SQL without ingestion pipelines, returning live data from Pipes workspaces via the Steampipe plugin.
- Multiple runtimes: Deploy as Steampipe CLI, Postgres foreign data wrapper, SQLite extension, or exporter binaries to match operational preferences.
- Token-based authentication: Configure connections using Pipes API tokens and optional custom host, supporting environment variable overrides for portability.
- Installer automation: Use provided install scripts to fetch correct binaries per OS, CPU architecture, and database version with minimal manual steps.
- Schema import and organization: Create foreign servers and import schemas to expose Pipes tables in databases for reporting and operational dashboards.
4. Firefly AI #
Firefly provides cloud inventory, drift detection, and governance with AI-assisted infrastructure-as-code generation to bring unmanaged assets under code and maintain configuration consistency.
Key features include:
- Continuous asset inventory: Maps cloud assets, dependencies, and owners across multi-cloud, Kubernetes, and SaaS to distinguish codified, unmanaged, drifted, and ghosted resources.
- Drift detection and remediation: Detects configuration drift in real time and triggers automated fixes to restore desired state before production impact.
- AI-assisted IaC generation: Converts unmanaged resources into version-controlled IaC, aiming for complete coverage and standardized provisioning practices.
- Policy-as-code governance: Applies AI-native policies for cost, compliance, and security, surfacing violations and recommending corrective actions.
- IDE and agent integrations: Exposes capabilities to copilots via an MCP server, enabling developers to codify resources and remediate from within workflows.
5. AWS Config #
AWS Config evaluates, audits, and tracks configuration changes of AWS resources, enabling change management, compliance assessment, and ongoing security monitoring with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Key features include:
- Resource configuration tracking: Records configuration changes for supported resources to streamline troubleshooting and operational investigations across environments.
- Desired state evaluation: Compares resources against rules to assess compliance with defined configurations and governance baselines over time.
- Compliance as code: Implements policy checks and evidence collection to support regulatory requirements and internal audit readiness.
- Security monitoring support: Continuously evaluates configurations to surface misconfigurations relevant to security analysis and posture improvement.
- Service integrations and access: Integrates with broader AWS services and tooling to orchestrate remediation workflows and reporting processes.
6. Google Cloud Asset Inventory #
Google Cloud Asset Inventory provides a global metadata inventory with listing, searching, exporting, monitoring, and 35-day change history for resources, policies, OS inventory, and relationships.
Key features include:
- Unified asset views: List assets and relationships at project, folder, or organization scope, with history for create, update, and delete events.
- Flexible querying options: Search resources and IAM allow policies using a query language, or analyze assets using BigQuery SQL interfaces.
- Export and monitoring: Export metadata to Cloud Storage or BigQuery, and subscribe to feeds to monitor asset changes as they occur.
- Policy analysis tools: Analyze IAM and organization policies, view effective permissions, and simulate impacts of resource moves between projects.
- Relationship insights: Access relationship content types, with availability contingent on Security Command Center tiers or Gemini Cloud Assist.
7. CloudAware CMDB #
CloudAware CMDB aggregates multi-cloud and datacenter inventory into a centralized configuration database, offering discovery, compliance assessments, workflows, and reporting across infrastructure and software assets.
Key features include:
- Multi-cloud discovery coverage: Auto-discovers more than 3,000 cloud services and on-prem infrastructure, consolidating assets from multiple providers into one CMDB.
- Cross-provider querying: Runs unified CMDB queries across accounts, regions, and platforms to deliver real-time answers for reporting and investigations.
- Compliance and governance: Applies prebuilt policy checks for standards like PCI, HIPAA, NIST, and ISO, with evidence suitable for audits.
- Change management workflows: Scores and governs changes, integrates with CI/CD and Terraform, and blocks promotion of non-conforming updates.
- Cost and software insights: Produces cost and usage reports, software catalogs, and SBOMs to inform FinOps, vulnerability readiness, and operational planning.
Conclusion #
Cloud asset management software plays a critical role in helping organizations manage the complexity of modern IT infrastructure. By automating asset discovery, centralizing inventory, and integrating with existing IT systems, these platforms enable better governance, cost control, and operational efficiency. As cloud environments continue to scale and diversify, a robust asset management solution becomes essential for maintaining visibility, reducing risk, and aligning cloud usage with business objectives.