ATTENTION: Service Providers
CIQ® Cloud
What Is CIQ Cloud?
CIQ® Cloud is an Operational Visibility platform developed by Almaden, Inc. that helps Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and internal IT teams monitor, understand, govern and optimise modern cloud environments.
It brings information from Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, artificial intelligence, identity, security, compliance, licensing, cloud services and other business-critical technologies together into a consolidated operational view.
Rather than requiring IT teams to work independently across numerous administration portals and monitoring tools, CIQ Cloud provides a layer of visibility across those systems.
The objective is not simply to collect more data. It is to help IT teams understand what is happening, what matters and what requires action.
What Does CIQ Cloud Do?
Modern organisations depend upon an increasingly large collection of cloud services.
Microsoft 365 alone can involve Entra ID, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Intune, Power BI, licensing, security and compliance. Add Google Workspace, cloud infrastructure, DNS, network services, SaaS applications and artificial intelligence, and the operational picture quickly becomes fragmented.
Each platform provides useful information, but usually from the perspective of that individual service.
CIQ Cloud brings relevant information from multiple platforms together.
This creates a broader operational picture that can help IT teams identify security risks, understand usage, monitor compliance, optimise licences, track costs, investigate operational changes and identify areas requiring attention.
In CIQ Cloud Almaden calls this approach Operational Visibility.
What Is Operational Visibility?
Operational Visibility is the ability to understand what is happening across the wider technology environment rather than monitoring individual systems in isolation.
Traditional monitoring might tell you whether Microsoft 365 is available.
Operational Visibility asks additional questions.
Are important accounts protected by MFA? Are privileged roles being used appropriately? Are licences assigned to people who no longer use them? Is security posture improving or deteriorating? Are users approaching OneDrive limitations? Are cloud or AI costs increasing? Are new AI technologies appearing within the organisation? Are compliance controls still being maintained?
Answering those questions requires information from different systems to be considered together.
CIQ Cloud organises this approach around a continuous lifecycle:
Discover
Understand what users, applications, services, assets and technologies exist across the environment.
Monitor
Continuously observe the operational signals that indicate how those environments are being used and how they are changing.
Understand
Turn data from multiple systems into useful operational context.
Govern
Use that understanding to improve security, compliance, policy and operational control.
Optimise
Identify opportunities to reduce unnecessary costs, remove waste and operate the environment more effectively.
Technology never stops changing, so optimisation feeds naturally back into discovery. Operational Visibility is therefore a continuous cycle rather than a one-time assessment. This approach is an integral part of our inbuilt Quarterly Business Review for MSPs.
What Can CIQ Cloud Monitor?
CIQ Cloud is designed around an expanding ecosystem of integrations rather than a single technology vendor.
Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 is one of the most extensive areas of CIQ Cloud coverage.
CIQ Cloud can provide Operational Visibility across areas including Microsoft Entra ID, Microsoft Secure Score, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Intune, Power BI and Microsoft 365 licensing.
This allows IT teams to consider identity, security, collaboration, usage, licensing and operational information together rather than relying entirely upon separate Microsoft administration experiences.
For MSPs, this visibility can be extended across multiple customer tenants.
Security and Identity
Identity has become one of the most important control points in modern IT.
CIQ Cloud helps organisations understand identity and security posture through information such as MFA adoption, Conditional Access, privileged roles, guest users, inactive accounts, unusual sign-in activity and Microsoft Secure Score.
Continuous visibility also helps identify changes that may occur between formal security or compliance reviews.
Compliance
Compliance should not only be considered immediately before an audit.
CIQ Cloud supports continuous compliance monitoring, helping organisations understand whether relevant technology controls remain in the expected state over time.
Cyber Essentials is an important example. Information already collected from Microsoft 365 and endpoint environments can be used to support ongoing assessment of relevant Cyber Essentials controls.
The objective is continuous readiness rather than relying entirely upon periodic point-in-time assessments.
Licensing and Cost Optimisation
Cloud subscriptions can represent a significant proportion of IT expenditure, but assigning a licence does not necessarily mean it is being used.
CIQ Cloud combines licensing, account and usage information to help organisations identify inactive users, underutilised subscriptions and potential opportunities for optimisation.
This is particularly useful ahead of licence renewals, when identified savings can often be converted into actual reductions in expenditure.
Even where contracts prevent an immediate financial saving, removing unnecessary access and identifying inactive accounts can provide immediate governance and security benefits.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is creating a new operational environment for IT teams to understand. CIQ Cloud approaches this from two complementary directions.
OpenAI Monitoring provides operational visibility into supported OpenAI environments, including areas such as usage, projects, costs, model utilisation, model lifecycle, API key activity, budgets and rate-limit capacity.
AI Estate Discovery uses available endpoint and asset information to identify indicators of AI technologies appearing within the organisation, such as local LLM runtimes, AI development tools and related frameworks.
AI Estate Discovery can help organisations investigate AI Sprawl and Shadow AI, although it should not be interpreted as complete detection of every AI service or browser-based AI interaction.
Together, these capabilities help extend Operational Visibility into the rapidly evolving enterprise AI estate.
Google Workspace and Other Cloud Services
CIQ Cloud's architecture is not limited to Microsoft technologies.
Google Workspace and other cloud, SaaS, DNS, network, IT asset, AI and service-management platforms can form part of the wider operational ecosystem.
This multi-source approach is fundamental to CIQ Cloud.
The underlying technology products may change over time. The requirement to understand what is happening across the environment remains.
Who Uses CIQ Cloud?
CIQ Cloud is primarily designed for Managed Service Providers and enterprise/internal IT teams.
CIQ Cloud for MSPs
MSPs face an additional challenge because operational complexity is multiplied across multiple customers.
An engineer may need to understand security posture, licensing, identity, compliance and service health across dozens or hundreds of Microsoft 365 tenants alongside other customer technologies.
CIQ Cloud provides a multi-tenant operational layer across these environments.
This can help MSPs identify customers requiring attention, standardise governance, automate repetitive monitoring, support service-management workflows and provide meaningful information for customer reporting and Quarterly Business Reviews.
CIQ Cloud for Enterprise IT
Internal IT teams face a different version of the same problem.
Information is frequently fragmented across administration portals belonging to Microsoft, Google, cloud providers, security vendors and SaaS applications.
CIQ Cloud provides a consolidated Operational Visibility layer across those systems, helping teams understand the wider technology estate without attempting to replace the specialist tools used to administer it.
Does CIQ Cloud Replace Microsoft 365 Admin Center?
No.
CIQ Cloud is not intended to replace Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Google Admin Console or other native administration platforms.
Those systems remain the authoritative tools for administering their respective technologies. CIQ Cloud provides a layer across those systems.
This makes it possible to bring operational signals together, correlate information from different technologies and provide a consistent operational view across services and, for MSPs, across customers.
Is CIQ Cloud a Monitoring Platform?
Monitoring is an important part of CIQ Cloud, but describing CIQ Cloud simply as a monitoring platform misses much of its purpose.
Traditional monitoring tends to focus on individual systems, services or infrastructure.
CIQ Cloud combines monitoring with discovery, analysis, governance and optimisation.
That is why we describe it as an Operational Visibility platform.
Who Develops CIQ Cloud?
CIQ Cloud is developed by Almaden, Inc., an established IT management software company.
Almaden is also the company behind the Collective IQ® family of IT Asset Management and Digital Employee Experience solutions.
CIQ is the short form of Collective IQ.
Collective IQ® and CIQ® are registered trade marks of Almaden, Inc. in the United Kingdom.
CIQ Cloud is a distinct Almaden product that extends the CIQ philosophy of turning fragmented technology data into useful intelligence into modern cloud, SaaS and AI operations.
The concept behind CIQ Cloud and its Operational Visibility approach was conceived by Peter Stevens, Chief Information Officer of Almaden, Inc.
You can learn more about the company, product history and people behind the platform on the About CIQ Cloud page.
CIQ Cloud in One Sentence
CIQ Cloud is Almaden's Operational Visibility platform for bringing cloud, SaaS, security, identity, licensing, compliance and AI information together so MSPs and IT teams can understand what is happening across their technology environment and take informed action.
Learn More About CIQ Cloud
Explore CIQ Cloud's core capabilities:
Operational Visibility — understand the philosophy and approach behind CIQ Cloud.
Microsoft 365 Monitoring — explore visibility across Microsoft 365 security, identity, licensing, collaboration and operations.
Artificial Intelligence — explore OpenAI Monitoring and AI Estate Discovery.
CIQ Cloud for MSPs — see how multi-tenant Operational Visibility helps Managed Service Providers.
CIQ Cloud Integrations — explore the platforms and technologies that contribute to the CIQ Cloud operational ecosystem.
About CIQ Cloud — learn about Almaden, Collective IQ®, CIQ® and the origins of CIQ Cloud.
Use cases
Whether you’re an MSP or an internal IT team, we’ve got you covered.
Standardize how you monitor and report on cloud health across dozens, or hundreds, of environments.
Deliver higher-value cloud management services and justify your MRR with concrete data in every QBR.
- Multi-tenant dashboards tailored to MSP workflows
- Out-of-the-box reports for lifecycle & risk reviews
- Alert routing designed for NOC and service desks
Give stakeholders a clear story of uptime, performance, and risk across the cloud services your business runs on.
- Track SLAs for business-critical applications
- Partner-friendly visibility for key vendors
- Give leadership executive-level dashboards
FAQ
Answers to common questions about CIQ® Cloud.
Do I need to install agents on endpoints or servers?
No. CIQ® Cloud connects directly to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Azure AD, and supported SaaS platforms using secure APIs and OAuth permissions. That means faster onboarding, lower maintenance, and no impact on endpoint performance.
Do you support Microsoft and Google Workspace?
Yes - CIQ Cloud works with both M365 and Google Workspace. We provide integration guides for both products along with simple integration tests
What permissions do you need?
We divide capabilities up between those which need Read Only access, for monitoring only, and Read Write for control purposes. You can start with Read Only permissions and add Read Write on a per tenant basis.
The inbuilt setup guides show the additional functions available with Read Write permissions, they also provide a Test facility so you know you have the correct permissions.
How long does it take to get value from the trial?
Most MSPs and IT teams connect their first tenant in under 10 minutes. Within the first day you’ll see live service health, usage, and security data—plus out-of-the-box reports you can share with stakeholders.
Is CIQ® Cloud safe for highly regulated industries?
Yes. We follow industry best practices for encryption, access control, and data isolation. We do not modify your tenant configuration, and you can remove access at any time. Our team can walk your security team through our architecture. You can start with read/only connections and add the ability to update tenants when you need additional capabilities.
Can I integrate alerts into my existing tools?
Absolutely. Out of the box you can route alerts into email, or popular PSAs. Once publicly available our API and webhooks also let you connect CIQ® Cloud into custom workflows. Check out the Integrations page for details
Do you integrate with PSA solutions
What happens when my trial ends?
You can choose to upgrade to a paid plan and keep all of your configurations and historical data, or let the trial expire. We’ll send reminders before your trial ends so you can make an informed decision.
Give your clients Operational Visibility they will understand
Start your free 14 - day trial of CIQ® Cloud and see how effortless Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and cloud monitoring can be.
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