When it comes to public cloud environments, organizations are seeking ways to achieve meaningful cost reductions. Public cloud makes consumption easy, but that comes with significant challenges. When I'm asked how ePlus achieves this goal while maintaining customer satisfaction, the simplest answer is: people, process, and tools. Some version of that formula sits behind almost every meaningful IT success—and for good reason.
We’ve delivered advanced Azure services for years, but the mature savings tracking system we rely on today has been in place for just over three years. It tracks the thousands of different savings recommendations we’ve executed across our customer base and allows us to elevate our own expectations.
Tools
We’ll start with tools. Our system does more than identify recommendations; it also generates the implementation, rollback, and testing commands for each one. This streamlines handoff to our customer's change management process, freeing their teams to focus on execution and aligning business process. We also use Azure-native tools to visualize these recommendations. That same view is available to both our engineers and our customers, including with our base Cloud Service Provider offering. It makes it easy to review, discuss, and compare individual recommendations and related groups of opportunities.
Process
Each month, we run the full product line through pipelines and build agents to refresh the data. That process also verifies whether each recommendation has been completed. When you’re reporting savings, this certainty matters.
Once the data is refreshed, our engineers review every recommendation. The product line is an incredible advantage, but we never present an option to a customer without engineer review first. After that initial assessment, the recommendations go to a panel of team leads for discussion: Are there complications? Is it a priority? Will another change, such as an application lifecycle event, make it irrelevant? Together, they filter out anything that lacks enough value to present.
During our regular monthly tech sync, we review each recommendation with the customer team and request approval to move forward.
People
Many people assume a service provider’s “secret sauce” is the tooling and process—and those are absolutely important. But the biggest factor is people. Plenty of organizations have tools that generate recommendations. Recommendations alone do not produce outcomes. Someone still has to carry them through. An engineer must answer questions, explain potential impacts, plan the change window, file the change request, and execute the work.
In many cases, our engineers work directly with application and development teams. Those teams have many responsibilities, but budget ownership is not usually one of them. Our staff know how to explain the value, organize the work, and, when needed, push the process forward.
Expectations
As we onboard new environments and have unoptimized deployments to analyze, it can seem like the opportunities for savings are endless. However, with our long-term customers most services are well optimized and continuing to drive new reductions is more demanding.
About a year ago we examined our savings historically to determine if we were saving more money as customers expanded naturally or if we were increasing the amount of savings by percentage in their environment.
Raising that percentage month-over-month has proven challenging, but it has also helped us define a higher standard for this work and better communicate its value to the teams we support.
Closing
These principles apply to nearly every organization using the public cloud. When used well, the cloud can be more cost-effective in almost any scenario—but only if it is optimized. If you’re facing that challenge and want to understand what’s possible, we’d be glad to use our product line to provide a complimentary assessment. You can contact us at ecms@eplus.com.
Be sure to check out the full ePlus Cloud Managed Services blog. Happy Clouds!