Today, working in the cloud is the norm. Organisations around the world are seeing huge cost and time saving benefits due to the speed and simplicity with which developers can spin up containers, and the fact that a pay-for-what-you-use charging model applies. But without comprehensive governance, it’s all too easy for costs to escalate through wasteful overprovisioning, services needlessly running 24/7, and continued reliance on out-of-date instance types.
Seeing this issue repeatedly with customers, Civica’s new Cloud Optimisation Service now provides organisations with an holistic view of their public cloud environments, enabling them to improve governance, manage spend, reduce risk and increase the value they see from the cloud.
Practising what it preaches, Civica is implementing its new service within its own business. By identifying and streamlining siloed cloud environments across the entire organisation it expects to realise cost savings of over 15% per month in the first year alone.
Getting to grips with your full cloud environment
The Cloud Optimisation Service combines insightful reporting on public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments with expert analysis and consultancy from Civica specialists. It uses an industry-leading cloud-based reporting service which receives real-time data feeds from public cloud providers.
As part of the service, Civica will carry out an extensive review of an organisation’s cloud spend, and recommend actions to drive savings and improve the use of the public cloud to support business objectives. It’s quick to set up, with no need to install any software on servers.
John Hood, Chief Technology Officer at Civica, explained: “We regularly talk about the need for digital transformation, but how can you transform your IT if you don’t know what you have and how you manage it?
“We’ve been helping our customers move to the cloud for several years. But it’s time to move beyond that. This evolution of our cloud offering provides users with an holistic view to ensure organisations are able to gain control and reduce costs by eliminating under-used cloud containers and subscriptions. It also allows organisations to improve governance by providing controls around the setup, management and decommissioning of new instances.”
Buckinghamshire County Council has recently selected the new service to gain control and transparency around its cloud environments. Jon Brainch, Senior Technical Officer at Buckinghamshire County Council, explained: “Like many organisations, we’re increasing the use of cloud technology where possible to deliver cost and time efficiencies, but this has created a new challenge for us in terms of ensuring that the costs associated with the cloud environments we’re running aren’t continually increasing. This new offering from Civica is exactly what we need to help us maintain control and budget holder accountability of our cloud expenditure.”
Civica’s Cloud Optimisation Service reports on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Mark Bradford, Director Software Asset Management at Microsoft UK, said: “As a leading provider of digital solutions across both the public and private sector, Microsoft welcomes this new offering from our partner Civica which will help our customers make the most of the Azure platform.”
To provide the service, Civica has partnered with RightScale, an industry leader in cloud management, which enables organisations to save money and improve operations across any cloud, any server, and any container.
Kim Weins, VP Cloud Cost Strategy at RightScale, added: “With organisations around the world currently wasting 35% of their public cloud spend, RightScale Optima is designed to let users govern costs and streamline operations across multiple clouds. We’re delighted to partner with Civica on this new service and believe its customers will see more efficient use of cloud resources and a more effective way to manage their cloud spend.”
