Cloud Governance

Are you struggling to find a vendor-agnostic, data-driven approach for moving applications to the cloud or not realizing the savings and performance promised? You are not alone. There are millions of cost, configuration, security, and performance data points to be analyzed and aggregated for every decision. And every one of them comes as an expense, either time or money. Technology spending is difficult to predict and overwhelming to control. CloudGenera demonstrates how to make Cloud Governance possible and to estimate your present and future technology expenditures accurately. 

Highlights:

• Change is critical. Can you accurately predict the cost of those changes?
• Do you have the conviction that you understand the economics of your applications? 
• Can you accurately evaluate migrating or modernizing your applications?
• Vendor cloud spend commitments can generate considerable savings. Are you driving the correct type of consumption for committed use contracts? 

What are the best techniques for cloud cost management?

Many of our clients have struggled with how they govern the use of their contracted rates and their committed spend contracts. Organizations try to get the best value out of their technology spend by negotiating volume agreements to get the best discounts available.

One challenge organizations face is how to handle cloud governance, specifically the use and the spending around contracts. Clients struggle to drive consumption of committed use contracts with their cloud service providers. Leadership teams frequently commit to multi-year spending with multiple providers such as:

• Companies providing infrastructure (usually run in the data center or the cloud). 
• Platforms that reduce the amount of labor and support to deploy a particular type of technology (i.e., a database)
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that serve as alternatives to infrastructure and platforms  

Cloud Governance Use Case 

Client’s Challenge:

After signing a multi-million dollar annual spend agreement with a major public cloud provider, CloudGenera’s client neglected to implement controls governing how that spend would be allocated and managed. As a result, client engineering resources continued to consume cloud resources without any limitations, causing significant unplanned spend. Additionally, compute instances previously purchased were repurchased, effectively doubling potentially unnecessary spending. Also due to the lack of governance and cost allocation, compute instances were not being monitored for utilization resulting in potentially overprovisioned instances.

Another result of the lack of governance is that when new instances with equal or greater performance are released at a lower cost, the client was not aware and continued to spend at a higher rate than if they were to change the instance to the newer version.

Market Challenges:

1. 1. One of the significant challenges we see in the market is how a business drives awareness that contracts exist and discounts exist. When technology is being purchased and deployed, they should be getting the best value for their spend.
   2. The second cloud governance challenge around committed use contracts is how they accelerate mapping business priorities to the best fit and approve supplier solutions. There are a lot of options available in the business today. There are a lot of contracts that could serve a single need.
   3. How does an organization determine which contract and supplier will provide the best value for that spend? It’s a challenge that larger businesses are struggling with regularly. It’s a supplier governance issue as it is a cloud adoption challenge.  

CloudGenera Solutions 

Our self-service portal and API service allow businesses to govern their procurement and deployment decisions. Our point of view is that one of the ways to drive awareness and drive the correct consumption is to give a business a structured, repeatable workflow that they can use to make critical Cloud workload management decisions. 

Our platform allows organizations to define their standards and use cases applicable to their business to help them govern the use of their supplier contracts. This is done so that it’s engaging to the end-user.  Being prescriptive and structuring their evaluation process is one of the ways to enforce better governance. Another way to implement better governance is to restrict the provider options available to them to select from.  

Another application of Cloud Governance technology isn’t just the horizontal application to drive consumption of committed use contracts but also to assist independent software vendors in configuring their applications and helping their customers decide where to run their apps. In some cases, this will ensure that the solution is deployed so that it can be supported, not just getting the best spend. The main output of this governance utility is a scorecard that visually demonstrates the end-users options as to the best decisions in handling the needs of their business. Through scorecarding, the end-user can govern their choices.  They are only being shown options that are supported to drive consumption of the services, solutions, and discounts secured for the business. 

To support the use case of an exchange application deployment as a collaboration solution, a scorecard example could be a comparison of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365, and Amazon Web Services. Driving better governance in this example evaluates service level, security and technology need in the total cost of ownership.  This is important to ensure that a business gets the best value for the spend; it’s not always about looking for the cheapest solution but finding the solution that will best meet the business’s needs (remote access at scale, compliance, security, high availability, redundancy, etc.).  

CloudGenera Scorecards are actionable. They showcase an executive summary and detail the services that would be configured and the unit costs associated with those services and configurations, and any gaps observed. The scorecard shows that each recommendation has a level of a gap around technology and provides detail around those gaps to fully provide a data-driven, vendor-neutral, analytics-based decision in real-time. This helps drive awareness and consumption of contracts quickly, efficiently negating the need for outdated manual methods.  

Companies subscribe to the CloudGenera platform to leverage this governance capability both in the self-service portal and through an API. This decision-making capability and governance capability are embedded in their DevOps workflow process and new application deployment planning phases.  

Is Cloud Governance for new application development planning? or existing application usage?  

CloudGenera’s Cloud Governance solution offers the opportunity to be proactive in planning around your applications and establishing governance around your contracts as well as governing existing applications to make sure they’re in the suitable venues and configured appropriately.

Register below to access our self-service portal to test-drive our Cloud Governance Platform. Receive immediate actionable results