Webinar Video: Making a Cost-Effective Transition to the Cloud

Dive Deeper: The In-Depth Guide to Adopting and Migrating to the Cloud

Video transcription:

Hello, and thank you for making it to our webinar on Making a Cost-Effective Transition to The Cloud. This is David Cantu, one of Redapt's co-founders. And today presenting is going to be Chad Stanfield. While we're here, we're going to help you learn what's helping people in today's business or what's helping people transition their workloads to the cloud. Really sharing common challenges that our customers face and how Redapt is making the transition to GCP as easy as possible.

Today, presenting is Chad Stanfield. He's our Director of Modern Datacenter. He leads the team that does the migration and helps people transition their workloads over to cloud. I think what is really unique to Chad and what I love is that he's on the consulting side for Redapt, but he's really been on the customer side. I've done a lot of this work for organizations he's been with, so he brings an incredible amount of experience, both as a user of cloud, and then as a consultant and strategist. So I'll turn it over to you, Chad.

Thanks David. Appreciate it. So today we're going to cover a few things about transition into the cloud. We want to really start out with the Google Cloud Platform and help everybody understand that it is ready for your business. It can accept the applications and it's ready to bring your organization into the cloud, whether it's small, medium-sized or enterprise-sized. It is available for scale and has all the features and capabilities that are needed there.

It really challenges that businesses face, some of the perceived challenges that might be there and how to overcome those, as well as how to control the operational and IT costs of leveraging the public cloud and setting up perhaps even in a hybrid environment while taking advantage of your traditional on-prem data center and leveraging what the cloud has to offer to get the best benefit out of that.

We'll also talk about the methodology in which you can migrate into the cloud, the benefits of partnering with a managed services program and the rapid kind of business innovation that that can bring to this transition for you, as well as solving problems together as you adapt into the new platform of the public cloud and understand what its capabilities are and how those capabilities integrate into your line of business and the applications that you're running today to service your customers.

It will be able to work together to solve any challenges that come up and ensure that you've got the best foundation to move forward with. And we also talk about kind of the business cases that are there from a managed services platform to ensure that you're able to the ground running, if you will, when you adopt it into the cloud. That the learning curve is very short and we flattened out that learning curve to ensure that you're really ready for the future of your organization and you can grow into it and invest into the scalability to meet the needs that your business has today.

So when we first talked about transitioning into the cloud, why are businesses migrating into the cloud? And it really is the public cloud has matured and it has become a tool that can be used to really help broaden the capabilities of an IT organization to meet the business needs. The ability to respond to market demands very quickly with both scale up and scale down.

And so you have that ability, whether it's a new product launch that you have and you need to scale up very rapidly at a low and controlled costs, or if a there's that something happened like recently, where you might need to scale down a little bit and conserve some costs for a period of time. The cloud allows you to be very dynamic in controlling that. And really the implementation, it's a paper consumption model. So you only pay for what you use.

It really removes kind of that capital expenditure that comes with building out a new data center or building out a new infrastructure to support a product line that's there. And so that ultimately increases your speed to market. So you can very quickly get into market with a new offering. You can be very flexible from a geographic presence that is there.

The return on investment is easy to obtain and it's easy to forecast because it is just that pay for consumption model. So as your business grows and your revenue continues to grow, then your consumption grows with it and it's not like you're making a large upfront cost in hopes that the business will follow that. And that's what makes it affordable and scalable to do that. And really it comes down to you can do a lot without a whole lot of upfront costs.

So you can design and build out an infrastructure that can scale globally and really do it at a minimal cost for the business as it's doing that. And as we get into this, there's a couple of things that we want to keep in mind. Perhaps these are challenges or kind of three common challenges to public cloud adoption. These are some of the perceived barriers to entry that are there. The first one are really around kind of skills and the soft skills that the team has.

You really need to understand what are the capabilities of the existing staff that you have. Do you have cloud architects versus your on-premise architects, and are they able to make that leap into what the public cloud offers and how you do that architecting for those environments? Really the operations engineers, you do operate it slightly differently in the cloud than you do in an on-prem data center. And so there's some knowledge there that might need to be gained.

Additional staff training might be needed. Some people might look at this as a burden up front because it can distract them from their normal daily activities of keeping the business running. And so you need to consider what are the costs to moving into the cloud from not only the cloud itself, but the soft costs: the hiring, the training, the soft skills that are going to be needed. And it's important to notice when you work with a partner, a lot of these soft skill costs become irrelevant and they go away because you're leveraging the skills of that partner.

And that partner will work with you to ensure that your team has the capabilities that they need and the knowledge that they need to move forward. Whether you're doing something new with a DevOps type of relationship, where you're optimizing some SQL and you might not have a really strong DBA on staff, or whether you're moving into containers and you might not fully understand how Kubernetes integrates and things like that.

Your club partner will work with you and ensure that you have those capabilities that are there. So when you're adopting the public cloud, proper architecture is really the key to a solid cloud deployment. Really the governance and security and architecture go hand in hand, making sure that you have the appropriate foundation, regardless of what size your initial cloud footprint is going to look like.

You want to make sure that you can scale, that you can grow, that you can move into different geographic regions that are there. A lot of times when organizations adopt the cloud, they have an opportunity to kind of reset the environment. They can correct any issues or perhaps some bad practices that may have been put in place or just things that they want to tweak and optimize in the environment.

And so when moving into the cloud, this is a great opportunity to take a chance and really review your governance, your security, your compliance requirements, and really optimize those for your new cloud environment. And whether you're looking at kind of FedRAMP or PCI, HIPAA, SOX, HyTrust, even GDPR, whatever that compliance need is, you'll be able to work with your cloud partner and ensure that you have the appropriate foundation governance and security in place and the controls that are there to manage that going forward.

The next challenge we want to talk about is cost management. If you look down at the bottom, it says through 2020, 80% of organizations will overshoot their cloud IaaS budget due to a lack of cost optimization approaches. And this is a study that was done by Gartner. This is also a study or a fact that we see as well with our customers, right? And it really comes down to the failure to manage the cloud costs are attributed to the key challenges that most organizations struggle with.

And it comes down to the complexity of adding a new cloud environment, as well as understanding what that reporting looks like so you know what the costs are and how to be able to control those costs. You might be in one cloud, you might be in an on-prem environment plus having a cloud, you might have multiple clouds. You could have any combination of these. And as you add these environments, there is another of information that needs to be understood and costs that need to be controlled.

And so when working with a managed services partner, this becomes much easier. The managed services partners invest in robust reporting tools that can bring cost visibility front and center against any environment that you have, so that you'll be able to not only understand your costs that are going on now, but look into the future and understand what the forecasting is going to look like for those costs as well. So you can really manage that environment much better.

When we look at kind of a review of the challenges, really we talked about skills, governance and costing. These are just a few of the things that we need to look at when you're moving into the cloud. And here are some questions that we should ask ourselves as we're looking at moving into the cloud is, how do we respond to the business needs? What is required to support a cloud-based environment? Do we have the skillsets in the organization to do that?

How do we transform and fund IT going forward? Do we want to make that shift from capital expense to an operating expense? How do we control the impact on the business, whether it's positive or negative? Can IT move as quickly as the business needs to move to launch new products or to enter into new markets or new geographic regions? And can we respond appropriately to that?

So as we go through here, we introduced kind of that managed services approach. Really the managed services is designed to simplify this process of adopting the cloud into the environment. With Redapt Managed Services, we ensure that the cloud investment that you're making aligns with the business vision, so that you're actually using the items that you need to use and you're using them at an appropriate level.

We do this by working through your monthly business reviews. We look at consumption reporting tools. We review the forecasting of that consumption that's there. We also deliver an effective roadmap. Now, how quickly can you get into the cloud? And once you're in the cloud, is it the correct foundation? Is it the correct architecture to scale and to grow? Is it really giving you what you need for your environment?

And so you can work with not only certified professional engineers and architects at Redapt, but we also have technical account managers that'll continually review your environment, your business needs and make sure that those are matching up. We also have the ability to proactively control the cloud costs. Really it's about maximizing that ROI.

When you're moving into an operational expense, you want to make sure what that's going to look like and you can control that. And you want that to trend with the customer growth that you're having so that it's very much trending in line and can support the needs that the business has on scaling out into the new opportunities. And then the support model.

You want something that's flexible. Some organizations are very hands-on and they enjoy learning the new technology and they enjoy integrating into the new technology, and they really just need a helping hand to get over maybe that first learning curve, or they want someone to just kind of monitor things 24/7 so they can relax in the evening.

And then we have other customers at the other end of the spectrum that really want a full service kind of turn key offering, where maybe they don't have a robust IT staff on site, and they just want someone else to manage IT so they can focus on the business. And so with Redapt, we really have designed the programs to fit into those two categories and provide either just an overlay support or to do kind of white glove full turn key services there.

Really we want to help you overcome the cloud adoption process. So when we get to the decision that we've decided, okay, we're going to the cloud and the business is ready to take on to the cloud, how do we get there? What does this transition and how can managed services help us get there? With Redapt, managed services is really built around addressing these primary challenges of cloud adoption. And how do we simplify this approach?

How do we make it easier for organizations to jump into the cloud very quickly and be able to scale and leverage what the cloud has to offer right away? We leave this experience with the technical account manager that provides customized services. It's really that personalized relationship where we're working with this together with you.

We want to bring you into the cloud. We want you to not only feel comfortable in what's going on with your environment, but to feel comfortable about the technologies being used and the capabilities that the cloud can bring, not only today, but in the future so that you can plan accordingly and help the business plan accordingly to what they need going forward.

That dedicated technical account manager is available. They really understand your environment. They are really the liaison between understanding all the programs that we have to offer as well as the cloud and how it fits into your organization. We do monthly business reviews. This monthly business review is really around asset management, cost reviews, making sure that you're taking advantage of what the cloud has to offer. That it's fitting in line with the business that's there.

And we also offer what we call CIO advisory services. This is really the ability for you to request direct access into business leaders or other consultancy type questions. Is something new coming out that you want to know more about? Is there a new technology that you heard of but you don't quite understand how that would integrate into your business?

The CIO advisory services is an excellent opportunity for you to have just a deeper level discussion, to help understand a little bit more about a technology or a roadmap item, or how to just kind of leverage something a little bit more for your business to help you become more capable in what your offerings are. Certainly we have 24/7 support at monitoring.

You can certainly open tickets via a web interface, email, phone calls, all those types of things. But we take it one step further with this proactive support, where we're monitoring your environment. We're looking for issues in advance. We want to find them before the failure happens and we want to be able to get in front of those items that we see coming up.

And we review those with you as part of that technical account manager experience. And then ultimately, if there is a failure, we respond to that very, very quickly. We offer several tiers of services as far as how quickly we can respond to that and resolve those issues in cases that come up. Cost is a big portion of this. And so the tools that we've invested into really help us monitor and optimize these costs.

They really look for sudden spikes. If all of a sudden you're trending at a cost forecasting that makes sense and you see a giant spike in consumption for some reason, we'll get notified of that and we'll contact you and make sure that that's an appropriate spike. We want to make sure that truly is businesses need that additional workload and compute power and that it wasn't an accident or something got left on by mistake or the code is doing something unexpected.

And we want to catch that before that spike turns into more of a problem issue. And so we really proactively monitor the environment and help you understand what's going on in that environment and help resolve any issues that might be out of norm. We also look at the configurations. We like to increase efficiency and reduce costs by just configurations. There's lots of things that are available within the cloud that you can leverage that might not have been available in an on-prem environment such as load balancers or HA capability or scale up and scale back capabilities that are dynamic.

And so we really like to work with you and understand the business and what the business needs are so that we're ensuring that you have the most efficient environment built out for you. And then really around that enablement, it's really the governance, the compliance and the security that you need. We want to help you be innovative in leveraging the cloud so that it becomes an asset to your IT staff to help the business and so you can continue moving forward with confidence in what's going on there.

As I said before, building that true partnership is working with a technical account manager. The Redapt TAM is the one person who knows all the ins and outs of the program, with the regular reviews against cloud budgets that you might have as well as focusing on driving accountability towards the costs and consumptions that you have.

Really that single point of contact is the person that you can get in contact with about anything that's going on in your cloud environment, whether it's something to do with that ROI, whether it's something to do with a custom report that might be needed if you want to make sure that the assets that you have deployed are sized appropriately.

Whether you want a recommendation on, should you refactor or should you change one of the items that you're using in the cloud to help with performance or to reduce costs, or anything like that? We'll be able to really dive in and have that kind of targeted methodology, where we do that monthly sync. We connect with you about everything that's going on in the environment, any questions or concerns that you might have that are there.

And then you also have access to a wealth of knowledge. There are several experts at Redapt that can support any of the new technologies in GCP, as well as we have a strong foundation on traditional data centers and just the technology in general and how it supports the environment moving forward. So we can really dive in and help understand the environment and really support your IT team going forward.

So when it comes down to the cost savings of managed services, and where does it really help? This helps because we analyze underutilized and idle assets. At times when you're on a traditional data center and you've created a capital expenditure and you've purchased an IT asset and it's running, you don't necessarily care how utilized it is, whether it's 20% utilized or 80% utilized.

You've already sunk in the cost to purchase that. And so you might not be monitoring that utilization as closely as you might want to. So when you're into the cloud, remember it is a consumption based model versus kind of that sunk cost or capital expenditure model. And so we really want to understand any assets that are under utilized or anything that's not being used at all, because those are potential cost savings.

And so when we're monitoring that, we're looking for those underutilized and idle assets that are out there, and certainly give recommendations around how to improve your costs by either resizing or reconfiguring some assets that are not being used to their full capabilities. And that really helps us balance kind of our price versus value, whether you're talking about a consumption or compute asset, or whether you're talking about storage and the speed of storage.

It's really balancing the availability of that item versus the cost of that item. And we help you make those determinations on which direction you should go, whether the value is more on availability or the value is more on decreasing costs. We can help with those configurations that are there. We monitor and look for misconfigured items. Those might be accidents that come in play that can consume a lot of compute resources unintentionally.

And so not only are we looking to ensure that best practices are followed in the environment as you build it out, but we'll also be monitoring for the spikes in any consumption anomalies that we see that pop up in there. We also continue to recommend environments that we see. The cloud is continually changing, new features are becoming available very rapidly.

And so we ensure that you're aware of these features and you sure that you have the ability to take advantage of those if you'd like in your environment and we can help you implement those very quickly if that's there. And then ultimately we want to help with the distribution of your content. You might have customers on the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States, and you want to bring your application closer to those customers on both shores.

Or you might have a global presence, where you've got Europe and Asia PAC and Americas, and you want to distribute your workload across each of those regions to ensure a better response time. With going into the cloud, we can really help you ensure that you've got the right-sized assets in each of those regions and so you're connecting with your customers that are appropriately there.

So as we go into there, we talked about migrating into the cloud. There's really kind of several ways to migrate into the cloud. We're going to talk about three of them today. The three that we talk about are really the most common that you have. The first one we'll look at is a lift and shift approach. Lift and shift approach is really just kind of taking what you have in the data center today, very little changes to it and bringing it up into a cloud environment.

An example might be that we've got an ad company. They just don't have the time or the money to break up any legacy systems. They're working just fine as they are, but they want to move into the cloud. They want to be more distributed. They want to be closer to their customers so their response time is faster, whatever that might be. they decide to move into the cloud without any major changes to their application itself.

Just a couple of minor tweaks to the environment, the infrastructure, some scalability, some security tweaks that might be in there. And basically as a result, you can move that infrastructure into the cloud. You have the ability to run at peak capacity, paying only for what is in use. And then you also have the ability to help the IT team focus on kind of the daily tasks that they have and the mission critical applications that they have.

Where this kind of really fits in is a couple of examples, is a data center lease might be expiring. And so you might have a data center that you've had and it's time to renew that and you might be looking to get more flexibility because of the public cloud and the geographical capabilities that are there. It might be aging equipment.

You're ready for an equipment refresh cycle and you're ready to move on to more of an operational expense model rather than a capex to refresh all that equipment. Or it just might be you want more geographic flexibility. You want to be able to present your application closer to your customers wherever they might be and have that capability.

And so lift and shift is oftentimes a very easy way to start adopting the cloud, and it's really a way that most organizations get their first experience into the public clouds there. The next one we'll talk about is application modernization. This is often referred to as refactoring. And so refactoring is organizations that refactor can modify their applications and their infrastructure.

It involves a little bit more advanced processing of the rearchitecture. Often it involves some recoding of the application, basically rewriting that application to take full advantage of cloud native features and really maximize those operational costs and efficiency that the cloud can offer. And so most often refactoring entails changing the application a little bit, looking at its components, benefiting from cloud native features like microservices or serverless computing, and really modernizing that whole application to be cloud ready and moving forward.

In the example we have here, this is a financial software company. I mean, financial services typically have some systems that have been around for a long time. They're difficult to maintain. It might take a long time to do any updates to them and perform any changes for their customer's needs. It can be very difficult. So they identify specific applications that could benefit from cloud native services.

They go in and they're able to rearchitect and recode the application and focus on leveraging cloud native capabilities and really focusing on flexibility and scalability. And ultimately, that just helps the company move into an expanded marketplace, being way more flexible by being able to move their monolithic application to something that's more flexible, micro services that are offered.

There's a BigQuery machine learning at GCP. There's a Cloud Bigtable that helps with managing the data, understanding the data that's there, moving it perhaps into new technologies such as containers or Google's Kubernetes engine is one of their capabilities. It's very flexible. They have serverless technology as well.

And so while refactoring requires a bit more time and resources upfront, it ultimately allows the application to maximize the benefits of the cloud computing, really optimizing cost and efficiencies as well. And so it's a great methodology need to really review the applications you have and get them more modernized and flexible for mobile platforms, as well as bringing them closer to your customers.

The last one we'll talk about is replatforming. Replatforming is usually the happy medium approach. It takes a little bit of lift to shift, it takes a little bit of the refactoring stuff, and it kind of pushes it together into something a little more optimized and something that moves a little bit quicker. So replatforming really moves assets to the clouds with just a small amount of upversioning or taking advantage of some services offered into the cloud.

For example, you might move an application up into the cloud, and rather than moving a traditional database that's there, you can leverage something like Cloud SQL, which is a services-based database that's there. And so it's a combination of not only the application and code as it's running today, but then picking and choosing solution capabilities that are available that are there.

It might be the addition of automation, enabling for auto-scaling so you can scale up and scale down. It really only looks at changing the code when needed, but really just to use the base platform services. One example of this might be if you want to add high availability capabilities, but you might not have load balancers and the other items needed on your on-prem data center.

You can take that application, change a little bit of code for high availability and you can easily implement that into your environment. So the example we have here is just a medical company. They just want to link their old legacy system with their modern mobile application. And so in looking how to do this, they migrate their system into the cloud native platform, more like a lift and shift at this point, but they're going to take advantage of some of the benefits of the cloud.

They're going to take advantage of kind of that load balancing capabilities, the geo capabilities so they're closer to the customers. They'll probably take advantage of some of the services offerings for the dataset using Cloud SQL. But as a result, it really allows their customers to interact with their application much easier, whether that's booking appointments or being more interactive on their scheduling that's there, as well as gives more flexibility in this case for the doctors to be able to have easier and more flexible access to the patient information prior to the time of visit that's there.

When we talk about what Redapt offers, we're going to focus on a few items here, but really that business transformation. When you decide to add the cloud into your environment, you're really adding an extension to your on-prem data center or you're changing your whole approach if you're going to go 100% cloud for your environment that's there. And there is a bit of a transformation that needs to happen. There's a cultural change.

There's a bit of an approach change to the IT environment how it's developed and what its focus is that's there. Really with Redapt, we help you navigate and implement the necessary changes that are there. We understand what on-premise data centers look like, we understand what cloud optimization looks like, and we understand where the benefits are to each of those.

And we really help you navigate these decisions as to, where should an application reside? How do I leverage the cloud and the cloud services to their fullest capabilities, given the application and the constraints that you might have around the business that you operate today? Really we want to make this journey as seamless as possible. We're leveraging experience and skills.

We have proven methodologies and solutions that help customers adopt the cloud in many different ways, similar to the three that we had just talked about. We have a customer that actually decided to move their entire data center up into GCP. So what we were able to do is we were able to help them understand the capabilities of GCP with their environment, as well as the future GCP capabilities that are coming down the road. They actually wanted some of the stuff that was not quite in general release yet.

And so we're able to help them understand what that was, get them into a prerelease program so they could test it out. And ultimately when it becomes available, they started leveraging it immediately right there. And so leveraging the skills that we have at Redapt and the partnership that we have with Google, we're able to quickly integrate not only their systems into GCP, but deuce a bunch of knowledge sharing as well, shortening the curve for those soft costs as far as understanding the skill sets and understanding how to transition from an on-prem into the cloud that's there.

So ultimately, we gave them a better understanding of the environment not only from a technical standpoint, but also from available discounts that are there and how to leverage the cost models available in GCP. The second thing we like to focus on is really simplicity. It can be complex when you're adding another data center. Granted it's a public cloud, but it is another data center into your environment.

And so there's a full life cycle to how you adopt that, whether you're in the planning design phase, whether you're building it out now and migrating it in, whether you just want to run and operate it and keep it going, or you want to optimize it. Maybe you've had some assets deployed in the cloud but it was done maybe not quite as accurate as you'd hope to. Maybe it's not scaling the way that you want.

Maybe it's costing more than you expected it to do. And you just want to come in and optimize what's going on there. And so really what happens is we can step in on any step of the way and help you kind of simplify your a journey into the cloud. We can help you with the life cycle management that's there. We've had customers where they've come in and they just weren't happy with the cloud the way that they've deployed it and we've been able to help them not only right size for best practices and optimization.

We have one customer where the TAM led a discussion that ultimately reduced the spend by $6,000 a month just by taking advantage of some programs that offered committed use discounts and things like that. And so we really want to work with you to help you realize the true value of the cloud environment that you have and what you need for the business to scale. So 24/7 support, we go beyond just the standard ticket management.

We provide an understanding around not only how do you manage tickets and how do you resolve issues that arise and quickly communicate those, certainly we add that. But going beyond that, we understand discount levels that are available. We understand rightsizing environments to ensure that you're optimized. We understand how to leverage new and upcoming technologies into that cloud for your environment and so that you can get some optimization, whether it's more in line with performance or whether it's the cost savings that's there.

We're constantly looking at the cost models. We're doing not only historical trending of what's going on and looking at real time usage, but we also have a forecast model. So you can forecast out based off of the trending and usage history what it's going to look like going forward. And that's where we really can build optimization recommendations.

Working with the TAM and that single point of contact in Redapt, you can continue to work together to make sure that you're optimized in what your cloud is able to do and how it's performing. So when you're looking to move into the cloud, you want to find the right partner. There's a few questions that you should ask when you're looking at partners. The first one, is this managed service partner an approved cloud partner?

Believe it or not, there is an approval process for the cloud so that you can essentially show your competence in the cloud and meet the levels of expertise that are required to truly adopt the cloud correctly and appropriately for your environment. What tier is their partnership? There are tiers of how qualified and how capable partners are with the cloud, especially with GCP. Do they know how to spell it or do they actually really know how to integrate with it?

Can they get in contact with the engineering folks at Google and work through any issues, or are they aware and have access to pre-release items and things like that? The 24/7 support. Are they there when you were there? Are they following your customer's ability to access that environment, responding quickly to any incidents that come up? How do they engage with you as a partner? Do you want a partner that truly is a partner?

That has someone who is vested into your success of using the cloud rather than just another name on the list and another line item in a monitoring tool. And how much experience do they have? There are several things you need to look at. The design of the cloud. How are you adopting the cloud? What are those migration approaches to the cloud? We talked about three of them today. Typically, you're going to find a combination of all three of those when you're moving an environment into the cloud.

And so you really need to have a partner that understands the whole concept of cloud from architecture, governance, design, adoption and migration. With Redapt, we are a certified Google Managed Services partner, and we are a Google Cloud platform premium partner as well. So we've met all the requirements to be a premium partner with Google and their GCP environment. A partner that really understands the role of governance in the public cloud.

This is important because governance is different when it's on-prem and your traditional data center that you might be managing and running today versus what you do in the cloud. It is a different environment. You do have to approach things slightly different, that's there. And so we need a partner that can translate the on-premise requirements to the cloud capabilities and how those requirements are going to be met.

You want to make sure that you're not designing and developing a cloud environment that's going to box you into a corner. You want it to be able to scale and still meet your requirements that are there, whether they're compliance requirements or security requirements or cost requirements, whatever those might be. You want to make sure that the partner truly understands how that translation is going to happen from the on-premise world into the cloud world.

Really addressing key items to maintain control over your cloud deployment. One of the things that we see is a lot of organizations will jump into the cloud and they're really excited to adopt that cloud. And then they feel like they've lost control over their environment. There's something to be said when you have an IT structure and you've got servers and lights blinking, and you can go in there and physically interact with those versus taking it up into the cloud or into the data center.

It's a different mentality as far as managing and maintaining control over that. And that's what we really want to do with governance. We want to bring all that to the forefront. So you not only understand the cost management aspect of it, you understand, how do you manage all the resources in the cloud? How is your compliance being met? What is the monitoring and alerting capabilities, and are you getting those appropriately?

And then working through any kind of audit assistance you might have. You might have a PCI audit that comes up on a periodic basis and you want somebody to work with you there. We certainly help out with all of these things, as well as interacting with our advisory services that are available. To continue this on, we just a partner that really understands the environment, right?

When we're talking about capabilities in addition to the managed services practice that Redapt has and that we've really been focused on, there are several other practice areas that really round out the offering of capabilities. We have a modern data center team. Really think of it as the tip of the spear for your cloud journey. It focuses in on that lift and shift.

It focuses in on the architecture environment, the securities that are there, any compliance and governance needs that need to happen in there. We have a team focused in on DevOps, experiencing with leveraging containers and focusing in on that replatforming model to bring your environment up into the cloud with just minor tweaks and a few changes that are there.

We have a team that's really focused on application modernization. This is what they do. They take monolithic applications and they rewrite those to make the most of the public cloud. This is that refactoring that we talked about. And so they're able to really come in and help organizations retool an existing or a monolithic application and make it cloud ready in a very short period of time.

In addition to that, we have advanced analytics that comes in and really helps you better understand your data. It provides more insights into the meaning of that data and actually leveraging that information to connect with your customers better. We also have a really strong foundation with on-premise data center and build outs.

This provides us a solid understanding of what is needed to successfully transition from an on-prem world into a cloud world. We're not just focused on one or the other. We actually have capabilities across both of those. And so really just understanding the environment that you have today and understanding what the capabilities of the cloud are and connecting those dots to make sure that the experience of integrating with the cloud in your environment is a positive experience to work at.

So that broad knowledge across all aspects of your organization is really going to help smooth that transition of adopting to the cloud. And finally, we want to talk about kind of that single point of contact. We really believe in having somebody who's your advocate, who's looking out for your needs. That technical account manager that works with your IT team, works very closely with the managed services team at Redapt as well and really connects the dots.

It's the liaison, ensuring that your business needs are being met and that you have a point of escalation if needed for any kind of questions or anything that's going on in your environment. We want you to feel comfortable to reach out to that technical account manager and have any kind of conversations you need as far as future or current state in that environment.

We really want to tailor that services, we tailor the delivery plan and the service reviews. We've been able to work with a customer who actually has... They're operating in all three major clouds, GCP, Azure and AWS. Via their TAM relationship with Redapt and our monthly business reviews, we're able to really have a solid budgeting discussion across all of the cloud platforms.

We bring all that reporting into a single pane of glass for them, so that they're able to really understand what that consumption analysis is. We look at, what is the right-sizing recommendations? And really are they leveraging the cloud to the fullest and not overspending on anything that's there? And so that technical account manager truly is the liaison to your business to ensure that you get the most out of your cloud environment that's there.

So in conclusion, we just want to remind you, the cloud is ready for your workloads. That the cloud offers efficiencies and capabilities that most organizations may not be able to implement, whether it's geo relocation, whether it's load balancing, whether it's denial of service protection, whether it's instant scale up and scale back capabilities. It's ready to be leveraged into the cloud at a very low cost for integrating.

Leveraging a cloud partner will simplify and accelerate the transition. You want to make it an easy and a fun experience adopting this new technology, the cloud. Leveraging a partner will help make that an effective use of time and an effective project to get cloud integrated into your environment. And then ultimately an effective cloud management services partner will ensure that you're leveraging the cloud to its fullest abilities.

Ensure that you understand what those costs are and what your consumption rate is. And that you're just integrated to the best way possible to support the business as it grows. And finally, working with Redapt, we are a premier partner for business transformation. We've served thousands of clients. We've migrated millions of users into the cloud. This is something that we've been doing for many, many, many years.

We have the capability to span both the depth and the breadth of today's IT environment, from consulting to the support that we offer that's there. And we really want to understand your business and help you take advantage of what the cloud transformation journey is. We have the experience and the expertise to take you on that journey, and to really help you understand what the ROI is and what your investments are going to look like. And so we're happy to work with you and excited to come to learn more about your business. I appreciate your time today.

Awesome. Thank you, Chad. That was an awesome presentation, and I think I'm just as equally impressed that you haven't been interrupted by family members or a pet while we're all working from home. Good job. I did get a question. Do you have time to answer any?

Absolutely.

Okay. So one of the attendees asked while at another organization, our team experienced larger than expected cloud bills from time to time. How do you balance kind of governance cost control with the need to innovate, kind of the reason that a lot of people are attracted to cloud?

Absolutely. That's a great question. And what we find is in organizations, when they get the capabilities that cloud has to offer, they get excited and they start testing and playing with everything, and they might not be thinking about the cost of implementing that. And so they might have it improperly scaled for a test environment versus a development environment versus a production environment.

And so working together, we'll help you understand what that scale looks like. We'll help you understand what those costs are before, A, implementation actually occurs. A good example is in a development environment, we'll make sure that that asset shuts down on Friday evening, and so you're not being charged through the weekend and then the power's back up Monday morning so you're ready to go in the workweek starts.

There's lots of little tips and kind of tricks, if you will, to ensure that you're getting the most optimal costs as you're adapting into the cloud and taking advantage of what's there. The other thing is the cost management. A lot of times the native cost reporting in the cloud platform is not as visible as we would like it to be from a customer standpoint.

And so here at Redapt we've leveraged other tools that give us more robust reporting so you can truly understand, where is that cost going? You can pinpoint it down to a single asset, whether it's a storage asset or a compute asset or anything in between, and know exactly where that spend is going to make sure that there's some optimization that might be needed and we can implement that quickly.

Okay. Awesome. Just one more rolled in. This is a little bit more detailed. When there are cost anomalies, kind of related to the last question of spikes and utilization that are unexpected or forecasted, how quickly can a customer be alerted?

Yeah. So we do real time monitoring on that. And so how it works is the monitoring goes off if there's a spike incurred. Let's just say there's a 5% increase. There's a variable setting that we can put on a per customer basis. But let's say you've got that spike, the support engineers as well as your TAM will be notified immediately of that.

And then the TAM is going to reach out to the contact of the organization and say, "Hey, we're seeing an anomaly. Is this intended, or is this something we need to investigate further and go into that?" So we try to keep that period of time very short. Typically, it would be less than an hour for that communication to occur during the business hours.

Okay. Perfect. And that kind of covered the two inbound questions that I had.

Fantastic.

All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it. And thanks.

Thank you.

Bye, everybody.