Most organizations’ growth in their use of public cloud technology has accelerated at a pace far beyond initially expected. This growth has led to a fundamental shift in how organizations finance, manage and deliver services of all types back to their organizations. Digital devices and applications are now at the heart of daily processes, as technology has become the glue that ties company strategies together.
Unfortunately, this accelerated growth has increasingly exacerbated inefficiencies that already existed in many organizations’ journeys to cloud-based services. These have ranged from over and under subscribed resources, orphaned resources, unattached costly infrastructure, and lack of fact based, trend-based analytics to ascertain the specifications and management schedules of cloud services.
How MSPs Can Help
Managed services providers (MSPs) are scrambling to catch up, reskill and deliver on the historical quality of services they have given their customers. Coupling this with historically high employment rate and difficulty in recruiting the skilled people needed to advance the development in service delivery, managing their customers journey to the cloud and vitally their experience once there has become a challenging, yet critical task for MSPs.
For the last 50 years when companies designed and proposed solutions to their customers, these solutions were mostly capex-based that CIOs sent to their CFO, who wrote these assets off over a period of time and built these expenditures into budgets and financial models.
These expenditures included the cost to deploy professional services, and a yearly managed services proposal delivered by an accredited and skills partner in the technology stack desired.
Fast forward to the big cloud bang!
Now, CFOs the world over have struggled to gain confidence that the new way is better, simply not believing that an opex based cloud-based technology model is delivering the value it was/is supposed to!
In many cases these fears are warranted. as cloud adoption initially within organizations often lacks structure, adoption management with control and policies. Moreover, there was very little well-defined governance and cost reporting implemented to understand fully what was happening, where and why.
This situation was due to the big, which dented the initial economies of scale argument for transforming from an on-premises technology centric organization to a cloud centric technology organization for many of the services customers needed.
Instead of building a business case and getting it signed off, many divisions and departments of large organizations simply create cloud technology stacks and services with the resources they have on hand.
Fast forward again to 2022…
Companies and their MSP partners have the most control of cloud resources, adoption & creation. Well defined policies have now been put in place putting IT back in control of when, how and at what cost technology is deployed in the cloud. With policies and procedures now well defined, cloud MSPs are now filling much of the skills gap, almost entirely in an increasing amount of customer cloud environments.
However, this is only the first step, as cost is still an issue and still in many cases far beyond allocated budgets. This for a variety of reasons, including:
- Digital transformation has accelerated, and corporate policies have elevated this need to strategic importance to the success of many businesses.
- The pandemic sent entire work forces home, working remotely and cloud resources to enable and deliver essential applications for staff. The corporation as a whole was enabled to continue trading at a pace never before seen in the history of technology. This led to a fundamental shift toward everything as services and cloud delivered models.
- In 2022 according to the Flexera state of the cloud report: 66 percent of organizations reported that they grew somewhat or significantly greater into the cloud than planned.
On top of these challenges, with this rapid and recent growth comes the opportunity for costs to spike to levels far greater than budgeted for.
- Over 60 percent of CIOs since 2019 have outlined cost efficiency of cloud use as their number one priority.
- Over 30 percent of total cloud spending, which Gartner estimated to be a 500bn market in 2022 and growing around 16 percent year on year, is estimated to be at a level of waste.The urgency to drive up efficiencies in the cloud are paramount.
- Optimization of cloud use is both a solution and an essential requirement.
Enter Kalibr8
Kalibr8 was founded to work with managed services providers to contribute and bring confidence back to customers that the well documented and formed opinion of waste in cloud spend and inefficient growth into their services was reversed.
For SMPs there is an ever-increasing number of applications and tools they have to find, learn, certify, deploy and untimely manage to deliver services effectively to their customers.
We at Kalibr8 help MSPs with these digital hurdles, including:
- Analysis of cloud tenants to help ascertain the behaviors and characteristics of each customer cloud instance.
- Ways to find opportunities for cloud cost optimization.
- Pointing MSPs in the right direction to deliver on this aim themselves and providing the functionality to remedy and optimize.
- Automated scheduling capability
- Automated scaling capability to optimize 24/7 resources to ensure customers are only paying for peak use when peak use is necessary.
- Functionality to find and eradicate orphaned and unattached resources costing most but delivering no value.
- Ensuring once optimized that expected and unexpected growth is done in an automated, controlled way with good governance, an essential tool for MSPs
- An easy to use, easy to manage platform allowing MSP to focus training budget in other areas and not in certifying harder to use and managed native tools and scripting.
Kalibr8 aims by Q1 0f 2023 to do this for Azure, AWS, and Google cloud in a single pane of glass, designed from the ground up for MSPs use. MSP’s will benefit with ease of use, productivity gains, outstanding reporting features tailored and configured to MSPs needs, and automation that dramatically reduces effort and mistakes.
Kalibr8 has a commercial model that is straightforward, based on delivery analytics, with a pay as you optimize model. The solution also includes no blanket percent of subscription, cumbersome resources, or instance/subscription-based pricing that requires constant monitoring to ensure underlying optimization cost stay with predefined product categories.
Kalibr8’s model allows MSP to easily on board as many customers as they like to, as a low analytic cost and pay for optimization automation where it’s needed, where there is a clearly defined benefit and where the cost to value benefit is obvious and weight heavily in high customer saving and value and very low cost to achieve same.
