Don’t let high costs and cybersecurity risks give you a scare! Optimization is the best way to keep haunting cloud challenges at bay. With Guidance Level Agreements (GLAs) and Monitoring Insights, you can successfully follow the 5 key tenets of continuous improvement:
- Cost
- Security
- Risk
- Performance
- Availability
Don’t Let Hidden Costs Creep Up on You
The cloud may have seemed like a harmless way to get away from traditional infrastructure and staffing costs, but are those new bills starting to send chills up your spine?
Navigating your cloud bill shouldn’t feel like winding through a haunted house, but with such complicated billing—mismatched terminology across invoices and spreadsheets mixed in with upwards of 500,000 SKUs and price combinations—a terrible surprise could jump out at any moment. For some unlucky AWS customers, that nightmare became real in September 2019 through a major billing error:
“Amazon invented more hours than actually exist in a month for billing purposes,” protested one customer. “Pretty much ruined my Friday night when I logged in to check!” exclaimed another.
Even though the cloud provider fixed the accounting error in this case, there are plenty of enterprise organizations racking up outrageous bills without even realizing it. From overprovisioning to misallocation, $14.1 billion in cloud spending is expected to be wasted in 2019.
But with GLAs, Ntirety is your guide through the billing madness and wards off waste by rightsizing your infrastructure to truly meet your organization’s needs. GLAs solve the mystery of confusing costs and even helps businesses predict usage needs over time through historical performance analysis. Ntirety takes the time to create long lasting cost-savings, instead of quick cost-cutting that puts put your company at greater risk of availability issues down the road.
Learn how GLAs and Ntirety Cost Containment Services help maximize your IT spend »
Don’t Be a Scaredy Cat—Reduce Risk with Better Security
There are plenty of things to fear when it comes to cybersecurity threats: data breaches, account hijacking, malicious insiders, and nefarious use of cloud services.
But what about the risks hiding inside your own company? Insufficient identity, credential and access management, and insecure interfaces and APIs leave your organization open to vulnerabilities. Even from the get-go, the challenges are clear—62% of IT professionals surveyed in 2019 AWS Cloud Security Report stated misconfiguration of the AWS cloud platform as the single biggest vulnerability to cloud security.
Even the good guys of data protection—HIPAA, FERPA, PCI, and GDPR—can seem spooky to internal IT teams with all their meticulous requirements and unpredictable updates. Monitoring compliance policies and procedures is the single biggest cloud compliance-related challenge, followed by audits and risk assessments of their cloud environment.
Optimizing without cutting corners on protection is a finely tuned skill that requires expert attention, yet only 50% of organizations are satisfied with their cloud security vendor. Be sure your provider isn’t just stopping at implementation. It’s important to find a true partner that offers continuous improvement over time to make sure you’re always equipped with the maximum protection.
At Ntirety, we ensure our clients’ security stack remains optimized with GLAs, which offer a step up from the SLA status quo. Becoming fully immersed with the ins and outs of an organization’s systems, infrastructure, and business goals, Ntirety’s cloud security experts identify the gaps in protection to recommend specific tools and processes, including those imperative to meeting compliance standards. By becoming familiar with a company’s ongoing security needs through services like Monitoring Insights, Ntirety can even forecast the security measures needed to meet upcoming compliance assessments.
We may not have a crystal ball, but through the recommendations and support of GLAs, your business can proactively reduce risk and rest easy.
Learn how GLAs and Ntirety Managed Security Services reduce your IT risks >>
Don’t Fall for the SLA Spell When It Comes to Performance and Availability
The path to becoming a fully reliable, highly available, agile enterprise is not always a clear one. In fact, it can often seem like a dark, mysterious road filled with downtime and engine problems from your provider.
Even the biggest players in the industry can have big problems—Microsoft admittedly suffered 3 major outages in 2019 that greatly impacted customers. Despite these issues, AWS is reportedly reliable 99.9987% of the time, beating out Google’s uptime score of 99.9982% and Azure’s 99.9792%. But conflicting reports show Google taking the lead in reliability with the claim that its cloud service was down for 208 minutes versus AWS 312 minutes of downtime in 2018.
So, who can you really trust for reliable numbers about reliability?
Unfortunately, customers can find smoke and mirrors even closer to home in their cloud provider’s SLAs. While some SLAs may go so far as to promise 100% uptime, that only means the provider will reimburse the organization when downtime occurs. It doesn’t cover any additional costs you may incur during that time, and companies with frequent outages experience up to 16x higher costs.
While an SLA on its own may leave you in the dark, Ntirety’s GLAs are a guiding light towards truly becoming a future-ready, agile enterprise. GLAs come with a 100% application availability guarantee and the industry’s only Critical Availability of Service Guarantee, offering 2X MRR credit for any downtime. Paired with Monitoring Insights, Ntirety’s team diagnoses existing performance issues and places proactive measures to maintain high availability.
Learn how GLAs and Monitoring Insights transforms your business into a truly reliable enterprise »
Take the Terror Out of Technology with Ntirety
There’s no reason to get spooked by the cloud when you have the right guide. Managed cloud service providers can offer all the right tricks to get your costs, security, and availability in check today, but Ntirety’s GLAs provide insightful treats so you can continuously reduce risk, optimize costs, and create an agile enterprise.
Schedule a consultation to see how Ntirety’s GLAs can help your business face your cloud optimization fears.
