At PTP, we help our clients accelerate innovation by leveraging the efficiencies the cloud offers. Our experience as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner has demonstrated that having a cloud governance strategy in place, at the very start of any cloud initiative, is critical to overall success. Without the proper governance platform your cloud project is at risk of configuration, security, and financial ruin.
We spend the majority of our efforts with our clients focused on security and implementation best practices. Yet during a recent engagement with one of our client’s finance teams, cloud cost oversight and management came to the forefront. The discussion highlighted that no matter how clear the operational and competitive advantages are to their adoption of public cloud services, not having a financial governance platform that simplifies cost management is hampering the ability of the business to extract maximum benefit.
This client had a small initial footprint in one of the public cloud providers and their finance team was already struggling with their current cloud bill due to the lack of real-time visibility into the costs, indecipherable bills, and an accounting reconciliation process that was slow and cumbersome. What our client was saving in management time and realizing in compute/storage efficiencies was being erased as finance had to dedicate time of their resources to deal with the reconciliation of cloud charges on credit cards, inspecting complicated service bills, and internal charge back calculations. Not to mention the lack of any visibility into their current month’s costs.
Their finance department reached maximum frustration trying to deal with the cloud billing data they were getting from their provider. The CFO was questioning every bill and IT was having a difficult time providing accurate answers as to how and who was consuming the cloud budget. The amount of billing data generated, due to the per second charges, generated spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands or even millions of lines to review. The frequent changes to billing data spreadsheets by the provider made any attempts to standardize reports impossible. Even when trying to use the providers native online financial tools, it just was not going to be manageable for their staff.
Fortunately, we had an answer. PTP’s PeakPlus platform offers our clients cloud security, best practice checks, compliance as well as comprehensive cost management features. Almost immediately from the start of our engagement our client’s finance team saw the value in the PeakPlus offering. Of particular interest to them were the following capabilities:
Billing and Chargebacks – The finance team was able to automate the internal charge back invoices for multiple accounts, business units, departments, and project/application owners.
Cost Controls – No need for the CFO to stress over cloud sticker shock due to surprise invoices. The PeakPlus billing analytics with advance alerting and cloud governance ensures that they are in control of the cloud budget. With over 500 best practices checks continuously monitoring the cloud environment to identify idle resources, unused resources, allowing proactive steps to be taken to better control the cloud budget.
RI Rationalization – The PeakPlus platform provides actionable data, allowing them to pinpoint wasted resources and provides RI recommendations to ensure every penny is continuously being optimized.
PTP focuses on providing the best cloud governance platform possible, so that our clients can focus on what matters to them: innovating faster and improving their business outcomes. Don’t let your cloud initiatives get derailed by security risks, compliance issues, or costs overruns. PTP is here to help. 7x24x365.