Proof of Concept and Implementation of an Enterprise-Grade Cloud Inventory Management System

Nowadays, Cloud Computing has become one of the most important research areas in the field of Computer Science. By leveraging cloud services, companies can achieve resource optimization and cost efficiency by scaling resources dynamically to meet specific requirements, enhancing data security and backup solutions by providing robust infrastructure, building redundant systems, and supporting disaster recovery mechanisms to ensure continuous availability, high reliability and minimal downtime. As a result, Cloud Computing has emerged as an essential point of reference for companies in several areas, revolutionizing their operations to maintain competitiveness in the digital age. Considering large enterprises, where each employee has distinct configurations to access specific services, and multiple teams may utilize different cloud providers based on their expertise, specific requirements, and suitability for particular tasks, establishing a single centralized system capable of tracking all data and managing permissions is not an easily accomplished task. As a result, in a company that offers cloud services, for an administrator whose role is to manage all the cloud resources associated with each employee, it can be particularly complex to have a comprehensive perspective of all business workflows. This problem grows exponentially if we consider an increasing number of resources, providers and accounts to manage. The study of a possible solution and the development of an infrastructure to deal with this problem were the aims of my thesis work. In particular, through a proof of concept solution, and subsequent implementation, of a centralized cloud inventory. A centralized cloud inventory solution offers a unified and comprehensive perspective on all cloud assets, thus obviating the need for repetitive access to multiple accounts or platforms. This ensures precise and consistent resource tracking, granting administrators enhanced visibility over the entire cloud infrastructure, with the possibility to efficiently monitor resource utilization, identify inefficiencies, and enforce consistent security policies and access controls across all cloud resources. The implemented infrastructure therefore aims to provide a single point of reference to keep track of all the assets present in a company, including users, groups, external providers and policies, enabling real-time analysis, assets monitoring, and resource management through side-effects. In particular, through the implementation of a persistence layer focused on mapping all the interconnections among resources, starting from those within an account, further expanding to encompass a cross-account solution, and ultimately progressing towards the integration of a multi-platform extension.

Proof of Concept ed Implementazione di un Enterprise-Grade Cloud Inventory Management System