the collaborative cloud: a simply smart solution · this fuels our commitment to innovating and...

The Collaborative Cloud: A Simply Smart SolutionSEE HOW CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT

IS TAKING BACK CONTROL OF THE CLOUD.

CONTACT

280 Summer Street, 6th FloorBoston, Massachusetts 02210 USA (617) 986-3900 [email protected]

WWW.CLOUDHEALTHTECH.COM

© 2016 CloudHealth® Technologies

At CloudHealth Technologies, Our mission is to help customers manage their cloud ecosystem easily and effectively. This means our business is all about you.

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AT CLOUDHEALTH TECHNOLOGIES, our mission is to help customers manage their cloud ecosystem easily and effectively. This means our business is all about you.

We understand today’s game is about agility, reliability and efficiency that is accomplished by choosing the best technologies for individual needs and workloads. We’ve heard loudly and clearly that you are looking for a business “partner” that will support your organizational objectives.

That’s why our goal is to simplify adoption, help manage risk and deliver a holistic view of your environment including public cloud, hybrid cloud, and traditional data centers and all the services and tools you use for infrastructure management.

Our team has deep expertise in cloud computing and IT service manage-ment. We’ve experienced the challenges we hear from our customers first hand. This fuels our commitment to innovating and delivering a comprehensive Cloud Service Management platform that gives you:

• Executive management views: A common platform and language for finance, operations and engineering across the cloud environment

• Fact based decision-making: Confidence based on integrated data analysis that your cloud resources and operations are fully optimized

• Insight for future growth: Capacity planning to address emerging trends in your business

So, let’s take this journey together.

To our existing customers, we thank you for your business. To new customers, we welcome the opportunity to serve you with our passion and excellence. On behalf of the CloudHealth Tech family, we look forward to our mutual success.

Dan PhillipsCEO & Co-founder, CloudHealth Technologies

IntroductionMANAGING COMPLEXIT Y + PARTNER

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SECTION 1 | CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT: OUR PERSPECTIVE 8

SECTION 2 | UNDERSTANDING THE ECOSYSTEM 14

SECTION 3 | TAMING YOUR DATA 18

SECTION 4 | THE CLOUD ADVANTAGE: CASE STUDIES 24

1: Integration and Visibility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Case Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

2: Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28

Case Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34

3: Governance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Case Study. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38

SECTION 5 | CLOUDHEALTH TECHNOLOGIES:

CREATING SMARTER OPPORTUNITY IN THE CLOUD 44

ContentsMANAGING COMPLEXIT Y + PARTNER

SECTION 1

Cloud ServiceManagementOUR PERSPECTIVE

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WHAT IS CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT? At this very moment, how sure are you that your operational costs are aligned with the cost of delivering new products and services? What about supporting existing customers while scaling to new customer markets and segments?

Better yet, do you have proof?

Effectively operating and managing a dynamic cloud environment, and checking all those boxes, takes more than just a cloud and the data and services that live within it. You need control; control could be in the form of insights and knowledge, but it could also be in the form of real-time information about how your business is operating within the cloud and where it’s simply not optimized. That’s what Cloud Service Management is—the tools and insights to control, manage, and scale a cloud without guessing. In other words, it’s the evolution of IT Service Management (ITSM) for the cloud. What was once taking place in physical servers is now happening in and around the cloud.

LET’S BE MORE SPECIFIC. Cloud Service Management encompasses the integration and consoli-dation of data from products that enable customers to manage public, private and hybrid cloud environments. This includes data from cloud providers, data centers, configuration, fault and perfor-mance, event, security, and incident management tools, as well as business data that is unique to an organization. This integrated data is dynamically grouped into service level perspectives, and enables cost, performance, capacity, and automated policy management for

Cloud Service Management: Our Perspective

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your cloud ecosystem. In short, Cloud Service Management organizes the multiple data streams enterprise organizations use to manage resources, define governance policies and deliver on service levels.Cloud Service Management is cloud centric and API driven to facilitate integration with best in class open source products. It addresses the three main challenges traditional ITSM suites face: complexity of data integration, the transient nature of cloud infrastructure, and complexity of pricing.

Cloud Service Management delivers:

• Consolidated data aggregation and correlation

• Asset management across all core system management tools – (cloud provider data, configuration tools, fault & performance management services, event, security and inci-dent management tools and custom data)

• Cost, usage, performance, and security metrics

• Long term storage for the data to deliver trended reporting

• Audit trails for change management and security

• Governance through policy definitions across heteroge-neous environments

• Automation

That’s what Cloud Service Management is—the tools and insights to control, manage, and scale a cloud without guessing. In other words, it’s the evolution of IT Service Management (ITSM) for the cloud. What was once taking place in physical servers is now happening in and around the cloud.

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WHY DOES CLOUD SERVICE MANAGEMENT MATTER? If you are a company at any scale, or in the process of expanding your applications and workloads in the cloud, Cloud Service Management provides critical visibility into the system so that you can both control and optimize from every angle.

VisibilityWith large, enterprise cloud infrastructures, even in the best of situ-ations it’s not uncommon for the right hand to lose track of what the left hand is doing. Cloud Service Management solutions give you visibility into the entire system and allow you to clearly access and understand the information you want.

OptimizationA key advantage of cloud-based infrastructure over its traditional counterpart is optimization—true optimization. With Cloud Service Management solutions working together through a centralized plat-form, you’re able to see your system holistically and manage costs and loads efficiently. You can then choose to optimize your cloud according to the nuances and complexities of your unique system. The result is a cost and load balanced ecosystem that scales and changes with your organization.

Governance The benefit of information is control. The power of control is the ability to create an agile system that responds to the changing needs of an enterprise. With multiple accounts, services, applications, and assets all running simultaneously, the high rate of change can make evaluation, analysis, optimization and reporting difficult, putting you behind. Cloud Service Management aims to simplify these processes.

Whether you’re fully immersed in a functioning cloud environment or just beginning to migrate parts of your infrastructure to the cloud, the new order of Cloud Service Management ensures that you’re able to remain in control and make smart, informed decisions.

WHAT’S IT REALLY ABOUT? MAKING LIFE AND BUSINESS EASIER.

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THE LIFECYCLE OF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

• MIGRATING

Teams move to the cloud to increase agility and velocity of feature delivery.

• ACKNOWLEDGING COMPLEXITY At some point, typically about a year after initial cloud adoption, the

organization realizes that the increased agility and velocity come at the

cost of increased management complexity, with the side effect of reduced

visibility into costs and cost drivers.

• REALIZING OPTIMIZATION OPPORTUNITIES As a result, a project is launched to reduce cloud costs and increase visibility

into cost drivers. (For example, one use-case is the desire to attribute

infrastructure serving costs to each customer to determine per-customer

margins.) Because of the dynamic nature of the cloud, added cost visibility

and attribution is an ongoing need rather than a one-time analysis. Once

costs are under control, broader cloud complexity needs be tackled

with increased visibility and automation. For visibility, the value lies in

providing a single place that shows the health of the cloud infrastructure

while maximizing information flow to enable decentralized decision

making. For automation, management complexity is reduced by minimizing

human (manual) workflows and allowing software to manage the ongoing

operations in the cloud.

• CUSTOMIZING THE CLOUD Invariably, organizations hit a stage where cloud adoption matures beyond

initial experimentation. At this stage, automation and visibility are needed to

extract the true benefits of the cloud and make cloud operations manageable.

SECTION 2

Understanding the EcosystemCOMPLEX, DEPENDENT ENVIRONMENTS

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IT’S IMPORTANT TO TAKE A STEP BACK before we get into the nitty gritty of infrastructure resources, cost, usage and performance data patterns, governance and solutions and remember one simple fact: in the cloud, there are as many interconnected parts as there are pieces of data. Nothing is linear. Everything is a constant and continuous cycle.

Much like any other ecosystem, everything within your cloud is in some way dependent on everything else. Cost is determined by usage, which is a result of load. But that doesn’t mean that reducing your load will automatically reduce your costs.

Knowing what questions to ask and what information to consider when optimizing your cloud is key.

Imagine a rainforest with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of species of animals, each playing an important role in the ongoing circle of life. Certain things like migratory and weather patterns are predictable. Other things might be less predictable but easy to adapt to without disrupting the balance. Then there are the unexpected and unplanned things that cause resources to become strained and systems to become inefficient and break down: drought, disease, over population. A lack of clear communication and understanding of what’s happening across the environment can cause a perfectly harmonious environment to unravel.

Understanding the Ecosystem Complex, dependent environments

The fluid and adaptive nature of the cloud is what makes it so valuable to scalability, but that also makes it hard to pin down in a simple infographic or picture.

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Now take that same rainforest and imagine it as an untouched nature preserve overseen by conservationists, scientists, environmental-ists, and biologists. Together they work to provide the environment and all the species with the information and resources they need to flourish. What cannot be seen or understood from the ground can be observed, tested, and adjusted at a high level while the ecosystem continues to self govern.

That rainforest is your cloud. Cloud Service Management solutions are the team. Creating, scaling, and managing a highly optimized cloud is not impossible—nor does it need to be cost prohibitive—but you have to understand how everything works together in order to know where to look and what questions to ask.

Your infrastructure is an ecosystem, how you manage, organize, and deploy that ecosystem determines how well it grows.

SECTION 3

Taming Your Data MANAGING COMPLEXITY TAKES COLLABORATION

HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE BILLIONS OF DATA POINTS?

HOW DO YOU FIND IMPORTANT INFORMATION?

HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT IS IMPORTANT?

YOU CAN’T CONTROL

BILLIONS OF DATA POINTS.

BUT WE CAN.

Optimization of your cloud infrastructure is a pipe

dream without a way to understand what the data

is telling you and know how it can be managed

efficiently. With CloudHealth, you control your data

through knowledge. If it’s happening

in your cloud infrastructure, we can

quantify it, understand it, and

optimize it.

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THE BOTTOM LINE WHEN IT COMES TO MANAGING CLOUD IS THIS: if an organization has any chance of efficiently scaling operations, it’s imperative to be in control and manage information. The bad news? The operational and human cost of managing that information manually is impossible. The good news? Cloud Service Management. The better news? CloudHealth.

Remember, choice equals control and control equals efficiency, performance, and cost savings. So where do you begin? How do you create the perfect cloud for your organization when there are multiple different services offered across numerous providers, each offering something valuable? Meet the solution to the solution: the heterogeneous cloud.

A heterogeneous cloud allows an organization to combine the best of breed services from multiple cloud providers, accepting the vendor lock-in that comes with specific services in return for the benefit of their superior features. Unlike the brokered cloud model, it predicts the desire for arbitrage will be trumped by a desire for achieving an optimum and stable execution of a workload. But unlike winner takes all, it presumes the diversity of services being offered, as providers move up the application stack, will result in a differentia-tion of clouds at a service level that encourages us to embrace a multi-vendor solution.

Regardless of what specific services you choose to take advantage of in the cloud, there are a few basic areas where generally the cloud can far exceed the opportunities available in a traditional IT infrastructure. Here we’ll talk in depth about a few of those areas: integration and visibility, optimization, and governance driven by policy-enabled automation.

Taming Your DataManaging complexity takes collaboration

A heterogeneous cloud allows an organization to combine the best of breed services from multiple cloud providers, accepting the vendor lock-in that comes with specific services in return for the benefit of their superior features.

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CLOUDHEALTH IS THE SOLUTION

The CloudHealth platform gives you the ability to pull data from primary sources used to manage an environment and then take critical metadata and see it side-by-side with your infrastructure. This allows you to not only see what you have, but understand what is it intended to do.

The goal of any growing organization is to identify patterns in usage that translate into time- and money-saving efficiencies.

“ When we look across early cloud adopters, we find that many built their own internal sets of management services for making cloud operations more automated, less costly, and more performant, available, and secure. Looking ahead, this need to automate and simplify cloud operations is a universal requirement for cost-effective cloud adoption and one that is very much not limited to early adopters. CloudHealth solves that need and can help any company, small or large, that is serious about maximizing the return of a cloud investment.”

– JOE KINSELLA, FOUNDER AND CTO, CLOUDHEALTH TECHNOLOGIES

SECTION 4

Case StudiesINTEGRATION & VISIBILITYOPTIMIZATIONGOVERNANCE

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AS ANY ORGANIZATION SCALES ITS CLOUD ENVIRONMENT, there are a wide variety of infrastructure services, assets and resources on which management teams and executives will want to analyze, measure and report. In fact, most organizations have several vantage points for reporting cost, usage, performance, availability and security. To compound the situation, more often than not, reporting needs change over time as the business grows and evolves.

The practice of allocating IT infrastructure to groups is a common and well-understood practice for traditional data center environ-ments. However the cloud creates some challenges in this area. The same benefits that drive customers to take advantage of the cloud; dynamic infrastructure, delegation of control, consumption-based pricing, and increased scale of resources being managed can create a very chaotic environment as things change by the minute. But that doesn’t mean that it cannot become a more agile and flexible system. In fact, with the right solutions, the service-managed cloud with its fluidity and flexibility can far-exceed its analog counterpart.

Let’s break it down and take a closer look:

• Finance requests a monthly breakdown of costs by depart-ment and by product line

• Operations asks for reports broken down for usage by project/team

• And don’t forget engineering; they need a breakdown of performance reports by application and workload

In a traditional IT environment, organizing an infrastructure in multiple ways is tedious and oftentimes inaccurate—by the time the data is collected, it’s out of date. In the cloud, it’s possible to do this and more, especially with a little help.

Integration & VisibilityUnderstanding how to define, structure and allocate your resources to enable you to easily organize infrastructure

In a cloud environment, it’s paramount to determine the level of flexibility your business needs for structuring its business groups for analyses, measurement and reporting.

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MEET PERSPECTIVESThis ability to view and sort information based on dynamic and changing parameters is core to CloudHealth. We give you the ability to create dynamic business groups called Perspectives.

What are Perspectives? In the simplest terms, Perspectives are the “lenses” by which you want to view your infrastructure. A CFO may want to evaluate by depart-ments or cost centers, the COO may want to look at environments or products and services, and engineering may want to evaluate func-tions. The point is that each role within an organization measures and evaluates the business from a different viewpoint or “Perspective.”

What do Perspectives do? Perspectives give you a framework by which you can categorize all of the assets within your infrastructure. This means you can perform resource-based allocation for your business groups by defining rules by which you partition your cloud assets and resources. Your rules can utilize, but are not limited to, tags and are automatically applied, as new resources are launched and existing resources shutdown.

What do Perspectives mean for you? Simply put, you can gain visibility to manage your cloud the way you manage your business. You can, consolidate lots of different data sources and the associated resources, put them into groups and then analyze in any way you want over the time intervals you need. In other words, it’s possible to see your cloud, your way.

WHAT OPPORTUNITIES ARE YOU MISSING?

How much untapped information exists in your cloud because it hasn’t been sorted and organized in a way that supports organizational decision making? What could you do if you could tap into that data? Imagine the possibilities.

We give you the ability to use all of the data you have from your integrated cloud services and solutions like; Chef Docker, Alert Logic, and Ansible, to create dynamic business groups called Perspectives.


SUMO LOGIC IS A LOG MANAGEMENT AND ANALYTICS LEADER. The company delivers data-driven insight to enterprises worldwide, enabling businesses to harness the power of machine data to improve their operations and deliver outstanding customer experiences at an Enterprise scale. Thousands of customers rely on Sumo Logic to run their most important applications and services.

THE CHALLENGEKumar Saurabh, Sumo Logic’s Co-Founder and VP of Engineering, will say firsthand that with all the cloud has to offer, it is easy to lose discipline and rigor with regard to cost. Visibility is needed to maintain oversight on how a company is spending resources. Sumo Logic requires insight into multidimensional levels of costs, in order to model out all costs associated with its infrastructure according to business groups.

THE SOLUTIONRecognizing the need for a comprehensive cloud management solution, the company turned to CloudHealth. We were able to give Kumar and his team the level of granular data Sumo Logic needs to ensure success with its cloud-based structure.

THE RESULTSWith CloudHealth, Sumo Logic is able to benefit from cloud-based benefits, such as consumption-based pricing, while also being able to easily scale its infrastructure in line with company growth and customer demand. In addition, Sumo Logic relies on CloudHealth for capacity planning, enabling the company to analyze resources, operations and usage.

“ The Cloud has reduced the barrier to innovate—but you need to have visibility into resources and spend. CloudHealth gives us the insight we need to be successful.”

–KUMAR SAURABH,

SUMO LOGIC’S

CO-FOUNDER AND

VP OF ENGINEERING

Sumo Logic. Harnessing comprehensive Cloud Service Management to drive innovation

See how this integration and increased visibility is working for CloudHealth Technologies clients.

CASE STUDY / SUMO LOGIC

“ We have one mission in life and that’s to help our customers better manage the complexity that

comes with cloud computing. At its core, it’s enabling customers to better utilize their cloud

infrastructure and, as a result, deliver better value to their businesses and their customers.”

JOE KINSELLA , CTO + Founder, CloudHealth Technologies

SEE MOR E AT: B I T. LY/CLOUDSERV ICEM A N AGEMEN T

http://bit.ly/CloudServiceManagement


OptimizationBuilding a system that’s smarter every second

OPTIMIZATION IS NOT A MOMENT IN TIME; it’s an on-going and continuous process. The goal is not to view concrete data in a silo, but to see it fluidly and in context of all the other moving parts within your cloud. Furthermore, being able to view your information consistently and from various perspectives creates a critical continu-ous feedback loop. Without this constant loop, you can quickly find that you have cloud drift and that your usage no longer matches organizational needs.

Optimization ensures you’re utilizing your provisioned infrastructure well, and it’s not costing you more than it should.

It’s important to remember that optimization is not any one thing. It’s cost, usage, performance, availability and security. The challenge is understanding how they work together and where they can be adjusted for a better outcome.

For example, you wouldn’t want to simply cut costs by using less expensive resources. You need to the available data so you can weigh the criticality of resources, performance availability requirements and the associated risk if things don’t work properly.

Healthy optimization occurs daily, and many times hourly. But this becomes a burden for teams managing cloud infrastructure and is problematic when trying to scale.


To begin, you need all of the data in one place so you can analyze usage. What do you have? Is everything being used that you’ve provisioned or are there assets that are simply sitting idle and costing you money?


Next, you can evaluate performance in ways that are meaningful to the business – by specific workloads and clusters. This means that you analyze data sets with information across CPU, memory and disk using performance data collected from Chef, Ansible, Puppet or the CloudHealth Agent.

Now you can easily see how your elasticsearch cluster is performing and if there are resources that should be modified or terminated. Optimizing performance will help you answer the question, what should I have?

Finally, you can optimize for cost now that you know you have the appropriate infrastructure based on usage patterns and workload requirements. Decisions around reservation purchases become much easier when you have all the facts. What reservations should you purchase, how many and for what time frame.

Good news - you don’t have to do this with a team or spreadsheets or multiple tools. CloudHealth gives you one easy to use platform that allows you to analyze usage, rightsize infrastructure to meet perfor-mance targets, evaluate security, manage cost and then automate the process with policies.


CloudHealth enables you to optimize within the platform but we also give you the ability to put policies in place to do it for you. For example, managing reservation modifications for 100’s or 1000’s of reserved instances is nearly impossible. This is something you might be able to do once a week because of the time it takes to analyze and actually identify which modifications can be made and which resources should be modified because they are underutilized.

ANALYZE, MODIFY AND MODEL RESERVATION PURCHASES.

Using CloudHealth, you can easily model a purchase for specific accounts, regions (e.g. us-east), instance types (e.g. m3 instance types), functions (e.g. Elasticsearch Clusters) or even business groups (e.g. marketing department). All those billions of data points are tracked, organized, and analyzed instantly. You can view your potential savings and upfront price, new reservation rate, payback period and, perhaps most importantly, automate the process with policies.


With CloudHealth you can create a policy that will perform the analysis for you on a time interval that you define and then actually go make those modifications on your behalf.

CloudHealth creates a cloud environment that is smart enough to recognize new opportunity and savvy enough to make the necessary modifications for you. It’s better than automation; it’s like having a team of folks working non-stop 24/7/365 to optimize your system for performance and cost.


KEEPING YOUR CLOUD SAFE AND SECURE: OPTIMIZING SECURITY WITH CLOUDHEALTH AND ALERT LOGIC

Few things are as important to your business as maintaining the security

of your sensitive data. Protecting your brand, evolving your products and

services, growing your customer base, returning value to shareholders,

and maintaining your competitive advantage all depend on the protection

of this data. Unfortunately, as hackers become more sophisticated and

methodical— using multi-vector targeted attacks—combatting their

attacks becomes increasingly complex and expensive, no matter where

your sensitive data resides.

Cloud infrastructures, in particular, provide a number of benefits to your

business, but optimizing for security in cloud environments can be challenging,

due to the complex nature of high-development velocity, frequent application

change and automation, and the ever-evolving attacks.

CloudHealth and Alert Logic provide visibility and context around security to

protect cloud and hybrid IT environments. We can protect your sensitive data

by identifying suspicious activity, obtaining context around security incidents

and vulnerabilities, and providing incident validation and remediation steps,

so you can successfully address the challenges associated with the evolving

threat landscape.


NEAT IS THE LEADING PROVIDER OF SMART ORGANIZATION SYSTEMS for small businesses. The company’s unique combination of cloud, mobile and desktop software, in conjunction with its hardware scanning solutions, allows users to transform important documents into usable digital information. Neat customers are able to organize, access and share both paper and digital documents, simplifying everyday tasks and facilitating information workflows. As the company started migrating its architecture to the cloud, it was in need of a better way to optimize its AWS architecture.

THE CHALLENGESIn moving its architecture to the cloud, Neat faced two primary challenges:

• The ability to efficiently manage spend – AWS resources were readily available to developers and the DevOps team, allowing them to spin up resources on demand. Neat needed a way to monitor and control resource utilization to prevent resources from sprawling out of control.

• The ability to delineate the financial impact of what Neat was doing in the cloud—Neat needed to ensure it was providing the right amount of production resources and services for customers, while also being able to separate costs taken on internally for development and QA.

Neat did not have a solid understanding of which machine sizes were the correct fit for AWS processes and lacked the level of visibility required to make better decisions with regard to its AWS architecture – all issues that were too tedious to handle manually.

“ CloudHealth gave us a really good opportunity to zero in on what we were using and what was oversized for what we were utilizing. This enables us to quickly manage and adjust our architecture to be more optimized to what the customer base was actually consuming.”

– PATRICK CURLEY,

CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER

CASE STUDY / NEAT

CASE STUDY / NEAT

Neat. Big picture, small changes, huge difference

CASE STUDY / NEAT

See how one client is using our optimization functionality to their advantage


THE SOLUTIONAfter evaluating different options, Neat chose our platform in order to incorporate a policy-driven approach and focus on cloud governance. The platform gives Neat the ability to manage their entire cloud environment from a single console, and has enabled them to simplify the process of managing their cloud infrastructure while at the same time reducing costs and proactively managing performance. Some key CloudHealth functionality that is helping Neat includes: rightsizing reports with recommendations, trended usage analysis by business groups, and cost visibility at a granular level that is tied to their AWS detailed billing record. The information Neat has at their fingertips through the CloudHealth platform has simplified decision-making efforts.

THE RESULTSCloudHealth has given Neat a powerful level of visibility into its AWS architecture, allowing the company to benefit from a greater view of resource utilization and a level of insight that has enabled the company to increase performance efficiency by more than 50%. The company has been able to benefit from the information necessary to support decision-making efforts related to feature developments and where to focus on cost optimization. With CloudHealth, Neat is now able to zero in on usage, benefit from the right level of visibility and determine where efforts should be focused.

“My favorite thing about CloudHealth is the level of visibility it gives us into our architecture that we previously did not have. The platform helps us paint the big picture, which can become very tedious to do manually - especially with a scaling architecture such as ours.”

– ANDREW SCHAPS,

VP DEVELOPMENT


Policies are the blueprints that define how you want your infrastructure managed and how your cloud will operate.

IMAGINE MANAGING INFRASTRUCTURE FOR AN ORGANIZATION with 100’s—more accurately, 1,000s-- of reserved instances (RIs) across the globe. Layer onto that a dynamic environment where workloads shift hourly and usage spikes are tracked on a daily basis. Managing a cloud environment such as this becomes nearly impossible without a dedicated team of experts. Or is it?

Enterprise organizations have long relied on the robust services and tools found in traditional IT service management (ITSM) suites that have enabled them to effectively manage and govern their data environments. But cloud computing presents new management challenges - disparate data sets, highly volatile and transient data, and pricing complexity. You need to:

• Simplify the day-to-day management of your cloud environment

• Automate optimization of IT resources based on business policies from a financial, compliance, security and performance perspective.

Consider this scenario. You’ve recently made a large RI purchase. It’s a sizeable investment and commitment. Your business is growing and your infrastructure requirements are changing. How do you keep pace with the changes and effectively analyze your reserva-tion utilization to ensure you’re using what you purchased and not losing the benefit?

If you’re like many companies, one of the main benefits that drove you to purchasing reservations in the first place - a discounted hourly fee - can easily become a major cost if you can’t track the data.

Managing reservations gets complicated when you need to isolate and evaluate multiple workloads, across many Availability Zones (AZ),

GovernanceGet ahead of the data and in control of your infrastructure


with a variety of instance types in a dynamic environment. The ability to quickly assess and manage daily changes across the environment can become risky and nearly impossible for organizations handle. You need a way to eliminate the noise and focus on optimizing the RIs that are impacting your business.

CloudHealth gives you the ability to create policies that trigger automated workflows to do the heavy lifting of analysis and recom-mendations for you. In less than 30 seconds you can create a policy that will continuously:

• Monitor RI usage across multiple accounts and multiple AZs

• Analyze RI attributes: region, utilization type, tenancy, prod-uct, end date and hour

• Evaluate and recommend RI modifications

As well as, automate changes to your RI environment based on a savings threshold. For example: If daily RI modification savings is greater than $200, trigger my automated workflow to modify all reservations that meet the criteria.

Policies play a significant role in helping customers simplify their cloud management and scale their infrastructure without scaling their workforce.


MENTOR GRAPHICS CORPORATION (NASDAQ: MENT) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions. Mentor Graphics is known for enabling companies to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on its AWS environment, Mentor Graphics was in need of a better way to analyze and ultimately reduce its cloud costs.

THE CHALLENGESThe Mentor Graphics Web Services team supports all customer applications, which can be launched anywhere in the world within 15 seconds, from the time of filling out the order form. Deployments are unique and often sophisticated. The result is a cloud structure that is enormously complicated and highly variable. The company had been using a cost tool. However, with the growth of the business Mentor Graphics required something more. They needed to manage multiple directors, multiple divisions and numerous projects, which ultimately led Mentor Graphics to CloudHealth.

THE SOLUTION CloudHealth gives Mentor Graphics a platform for comprehensive management across the entire cloud ecosystem. We enable Mentor Graphics to align cloud operations with business objectives, reduce costs by analyzing usage trends and proactively manage performance to meet service levels. Some of the key CloudHealth functionality used by Mentor Graphics includes:

• Perspectives—Enables Mentor Graphics to align AWS infra-structure with business priorities, while ensuring precision reporting based on roles. Each CloudHealth Perspective contains groups that reflect the way Mentor Graphics

Mentor Graphics. Finding a better way to manage costs through the cloud

CASE STUDY / MENTOR GRAPHICS

See how improved governance opportunities are working for CloudHealth Technologies clients


“ Cost Allocation and tracking by Perspectives is critical for Mentor Graphics. Since each infrastructure asset is part of a Project that Mentor Graphics tracks, all assets and resources need to be properly identified. If we can’t identify resources we can’t allocate costs to a Project and they become a Marketing burden.”

- RON FULLER,

DIRECTOR WEB SERVICES,

MENTOR GRAPHICS

wants to assemble cloud assets and services for analysis, management, evaluation, monitoring and measurement.

• Cost Allocation—Enables Mentor Graphics to benefit from the industry’s only resource-based cost allocation solution, allowing the company to accurately align cloud costs with business initiatives, while benefiting from comprehensive functionality related to AWS cost management, allocation and amortization.

• Policies and Notifications—Enables Mentor Graphics to create both broad scope alerts across its environment, as well as narrowly-defined alerts, tied to specific concerns such as tag compliance – which can become an incredible burden for Mentor Graphics if not tracked properly.

• InterActive Reporting—Gives each project manager granular cost details for projects to illustrate trends, which is particularly important since a manager may have six projects running at any given time.

THE RESULTS With CloudHealth, Mentor Graphics has been able to accurately identify and allocate resources to projects and provide visibility into cost projections from multiple viewpoints. This has given the company the ability to immediately see the impact their decisions have on both cost and ROI, while giving management the information they need to determine if a project should continue.

Further, with the Mentor Graphics “always on” support model, being able to audit month-to-month spend and break down every paid-for service has made a considerable impact on cost management for the company. Product marketing is able to easily break down spend and how it is trending—enabling Mentor Graphics to answer the question “Are we benefiting from our cloud infrastructure spend on a project by project basis?”


CASE STUDY / MENTOR GRAPHICS

CUTTING COSTS AND INCREASING PERFORMANCE

CloudHealth enabled Mentor Graphics to immediately save $1,000 per month on a pilot project. Had the issue not been caught until post-production, the cost burden would have been much larger for Mentor Graphics.

In addition, having continuous data and inform-ation in near real time gives Mentor Graphics the ability to make changes that impact the bottom line on a daily basis. For instance, instead of having 15 second access with hot standby infrastructure at the ready, they may elect to use cold standby infrastructure with four minutes access. Speed and instant availability on a particular project may not make sense and cost too much from an ROI perspective.

Overall, CloudHealth has enabled Mentor Graphics to drive accountability and maximize its AWS investment, based on the platform’s unique approach to cloud management and governance. Mentor Graphics is looking forward to taking advantage of more CloudHealth benefits in the months ahead, including policies, automation feature and predictive reporting.

“ CloudHealth is a superior cloud management solution – from both a product and support perspective. Nothing in the market comes close to CloudHealth.”

– RON FULLER, DIRECTOR WEB SERVICES, MENTOR GRAPHICS

FOUNDED BY A TEAM OF FORMER AWS MANAGERS, DualSpark is an expert AWS assessment, automation, and migration consulting partner that provides cutting-edge strategy, cloud native work-loads, and automation expertise to clients. DualSpark’s goal is to help enterprises migrate, or refactor complex workloads to the cloud, while equipping them with the skills and training needed to manage their ongoing cloud infrastructures.

DualSpark’s services fall into three major categories: Cloud Native Strategy, AWS Solution Assembly, and Implementation Services. The process starts with a recommendation on how to approach transforming and deploying your workloads to AWS. DualSpark then provides blueprints and prototypes for the modular components to own your cloud-operating platform and creates a web services platform to implement DevOps, big data, and security solutions.DualSpark relies on cutting edge technology and key software and services partners to ensure effective implementation of the custom solutions we see at many enterprises today. The follow-ing cornerstone technologies drive better integration and make assembling the key components simpler in order to get you to the finish line faster, with a low overall cost and a well-supported solution.

AUTOMATION EVERYWHERE: By leveraging automation services at every stage of the cloud deployment process, DualSpark can create high-scale, agile solutions with continuous monitoring to reduce latency and improve governance while heightening security standards across the environment.

AMAZON WEB SERVICES: As an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner, DualSpark helps customers take advantage of the broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and

DualSpark, a Datapipe CompanyPartner Spotlight


deployment services AWS offers to deliver some of the most complex projects. This helps organizations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications.

CLOUDHEALTH TECHNOLOGIES: DualSpark’s cloud governance practice with CloudHealth Technologies gives customers visibility across their entire AWS cloud ecosystem to effectively optimize resources and define governance policies for ongoing management. DualSpark works with CloudHealth to help customers scale their cloud visibility across multiple tool sets including AWS, leading DevOps and Security tools.

The final step in DualSpark’s implementation process is the Dual-Spark MSP Handoff program. This Managed Service Provider (MSP) program provides clients with ongoing professional management services from an MSP partner that can help them 24×7 after their environment has been optimized and migrated to AWS. As an AWS Premier Partner and recognized leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled Managed Hosting, Datapipe was one of DualSpark’s top partners in this program from the very beginning.

Like DualSpark, Datapipe has a deep understanding of AWS infra-structure, having designed and managed AWS solutions for over six years. Datapipe has even been called a pioneer in the space as one of the first Managed Service Providers to offer custom AWS solutions tailored to meet individual client needs. Datapipe offers a number of AWS tools and services in addition to those offered by DualSpark in order to create these tailored solutions, including Datapipe Access Control Model for AWS and Datapipe Automation Services. In a nutshell, DualSpark’s services and tech-nological expertise complement Datapipe’s long-term customer service strategy to a T. Through this acquisition, both companies are able to provide clients with a more complete approach to their cloud projects and continue to deliver unprecedented value to customers.


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CloudHealth TechnologiesCREATING SMARTER OPPORTUNITY IN THE CLOUD

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CLOUDHEALTH TECHNOLOGIES SIMPLIFIES YOUR CLOUD.Managing cloud infrastructures can be substantially more complex than traditional data infrastructures; however cloud infrastructures have the potential to become highly optimized, intelligent systems that improve enterprises. With the opportunity to automate tasks and processes, the relationship between scale and complexity is rapidly diminished. CloudHealth is a policy-driven solution. You get full visibility into your entire cloud infrastructure, allowing you to identify opportunities for cost, usage, security, and performance automations to simplify. In other words, you manage your cloud to manage itself.

CloudHealth Technologies Creating smarter opportunity in the cloud

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CONSOLIDATE: EVERYTHING TOGETHER. RIGHT HERE. Get your data under control and gain full transpar-ency into your entire ecosystem. If you’re currently bouncing between instantly outdated reports and partial reporting systems, you’re chasing your infra-structure. We aggregate data feeds from all of the critical systems and pull it together in a way that enables you to make day-to-day decisions more easily. CloudHealth gives you the power to see your infrastructure in ways that matter to you and puts you back in control and in front of your cloud.

EVALUATE: YEARS OF LOOKING AT DATA AND YOU’RE SUDDENLY SEEING IT FOR THE FIRST TIME. For the first time, everything you’ve always wanted to know is available, and all you have to do is click a button. Track your usage, costs, performance and availability and then view them from every direc-tion. See patterns, inefficiencies, security concerns, and cost gaps by hour, day, week, month, and year. Evaluation of your holistic system isn’t impossible; it’s just never been so easy. Or so instant. Begin to see what is and isn’t working, knowing that you can make changes and adapt instantly.

ANALYZE: WHAT DOES IT MEAN AND WHY DOES IT MATTER? FIND OUT. Don’t just look at data; understand what it means at every level. Is your enterprise driving up costs through unnecessary on-demand instances that can be predicted by patterns in the business and historical usage? See how the year-over-year demands of the business have changed, where is the system keeping up, and where is it falling behind. Create hypotheses and test them in a transparent environment.

OPTIMIZE: EVERY DAY IS A NEW DAY TO CREATE AND MAINTAIN A RESPONSIVE AND AGILE SYSTEM. Create new opportunities, consolidate, and develop a better sense of what your organization needs and how the infrastructure can operate more efficiently. Drive down costs organically by under-standing what’s driving usage and performance patterns, spikes, dips, and high-cost infrastructure through recommendations for improved opera-tional efficiency. AUTOMATE: DON’T JUST RUN THE DATA, MAKE THE DATA RUN ITSELF The CloudHealth platform does more than serve up the data, it intelligently analyzes your envi-ronment and makes recommendations based on constant and real-time analysis of how your resources and infrastructure are performing under the stresses of your workload. Execute system-wide changes at the click of a button. Manage budget and allocations simply. And know that we’ve got an eye on efficiency even when you can’t.

CONTACT

280 Summer Street, 6th FloorBoston, Massachusetts 02210 USA (617) 986-3900 [email protected]

WWW.CLOUDHEALTHTECH.COM

CLOUDHEALTH TECHNOLOGIES280 Summer Street, 6th FloorBoston, Massachusetts, USA WWW.CLOUDHEALTHTECH.COM

617.986.3900 [email protected]

the collaborative cloud: a simply smart solution · this fuels our commitment to innovating and...

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