Top 10 questions about the Cloud Cost Monitor automation

Spend less time agonizing over cloud bills and more time optimizing your cloud costs. Our accelerator, Cloud Cost Monitor (CCM) monitors the spend of your cloud-based investments and provides a single view to enable the promise of cloud cost optimization.

We have gathered some feedback and questions we’ve heard from customers that can help you along your cloud cost optimization journey. Take a read below and let us know if you would like to learn more!

1. What is CCM?
CCM is an analytics solution providing a single view to enable cloud cost monitoring and optimization for an organization’s cloud utilization and spend. It unifies usage data across providers and platforms and converts them into actionable insights. These insights enable you to understand and predict cloud spend with confidence.

2. What challenges does the CCM solution solve?
CCM helps organizations that use multiple cloud platforms and infrastructure vendors to simplify complex billing. The solution provides a unified view of your cloud spend, reduces the amount of time and effort spent allocating cloud spend by the department, and helps to realize annual cost savings.

3. How would you describe the business value of the CCM solution?
CCM provides an understanding of the changing costs of your dynamic cloud infrastructure across services, workloads, timeframes, and much more. You will be able to better understand and analyze your complex costs with interactive graphical BI dashboards with drill-down capabilities using the tool of your choice (MicroStrategy, PowerBI, Tableau, Angular, etc).

4. Does AWS, Azure, or GCP have a tool like what CCM offers that can help save money?
Cloud platform vendors have tools that show you where your spending occurs. Cloud platform vendors want you to increase usage and spend and not optimize or shrink annual cloud spend.

5. Why should we use CCM over other off-the-shelf offerings to optimize our cloud spend?
CCM combines the predictability of a full featured-packaged solution with customization of in-house development to meet your team’s specific needs. Additionally, the zero-learning curve provides near-immediate value.

6. What does it take to implement CCM in our enterprise?
CCM can be installed in any enterprise with zero disruption and minimal access requirements (only requiring “Read Only” access to AWS, Azure, or other platform cost files.)

7. What are the key analyses performed in CCM?
CCM provides a spend analytics solution that allows you to analyze Budget and Spend dollars by different hierarchies (Location, Line of business, Applications, Accounts etc.) These integrated analytics and drill-down capabilities combined with predictive algorithms provide for cloud analysis capabilities traditionally not available to organizations.

“Organizations that lack plans to track and monitor cloud costs overspend by an average of 40%. In fact, many companies end up spending way too much to make the move online – because they don’t realize what the shift entails.”
Ed Anderson, Gartner Analyst

8. How reliable are the recommendations from CCM?
CCM provides multi-layer recommendations “out-of-the-box”. These recommendations are based on the customer’s cumulative cost history, our experience, and lastly AI-based recommendations. At least 85% of all provided recommendations are without any human intervention. Based on a conservative average, CCM has been proven to provide continuous and significant savings on annual cloud spend.

9. What is the support model for CCM?
The CCM solution includes annual support which provides coverage for traditional product maintenance, feature enhancements, and a fixed number of hours for customizations or additional report development. Support is initiated through a dedicated email address with defined SLA’s.

10. How can CCM insights and recommendations be made actionable?
CCM provides an alerts mechanism to enable appropriate warnings based on burn rate. Additionally, and by design, CCM recommendations should be reviewed by an architect or administrator before incorporating them for individual platforms.

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