Q2C is a cloud migration accelerator suite based on open-sourced technologies to facilitate the migration of data from end-of-life data platforms to cloud-native DBaaS offerings in a reliable, accurate, time-efficient, and cost-effective way.

 

RTDS, an accelerator, moves data between legacy and modern data systems in near real-time in an efficient, reliable, and cost-effective way. It enables real-time integration and analysis of data, helping customers transition from a “once-a-day batch” to an “all-day stream” mode thereby accelerating time-to-insights for business.

CCM monitors the spend of all your cloud-based investments and provides a single pane view to enable cloud cost optimization. With features such as cost tagging, analytics, and recommendation engine, CCM enables smart governance and optimization of your cloud spend.

 

Spend less time agonizing over cloud bills and more time optimizing your cloud costs. Our accelerator, Cloud Cost Monitor (CCM) monitors the spend of your cloud-based investments and provides a single view to enable the promise of cloud cost optimization.

We have gathered some feedback and questions we’ve heard from customers that can help you along your cloud cost optimization journey. Take a read below and let us know if you would like to learn more!

1. What is CCM?
CCM is an analytics solution providing a single view to enable cloud cost monitoring and optimization for an organization’s cloud utilization and spend. It unifies usage data across providers and platforms and converts them into actionable insights. These insights enable you to understand and predict cloud spend with confidence.

2. What challenges does the CCM solution solve?
CCM helps organizations that use multiple cloud platforms and infrastructure vendors to simplify complex billing. The solution provides a unified view of your cloud spend, reduces the amount of time and effort spent allocating cloud spend by the department, and helps to realize annual cost savings.

3. How would you describe the business value of the CCM solution?
CCM provides an understanding of the changing costs of your dynamic cloud infrastructure across services, workloads, timeframes, and much more. You will be able to better understand and analyze your complex costs with interactive graphical BI dashboards with drill-down capabilities using the tool of your choice (MicroStrategy, PowerBI, Tableau, Angular, etc).

4. Does AWS, Azure, or GCP have a tool like what CCM offers that can help save money?
Cloud platform vendors have tools that show you where your spending occurs. Cloud platform vendors want you to increase usage and spend and not optimize or shrink annual cloud spend.

5. Why should we use CCM over other off-the-shelf offerings to optimize our cloud spend?
CCM combines the predictability of a full featured-packaged solution with customization of in-house development to meet your team’s specific needs. Additionally, the zero-learning curve provides near-immediate value.

6. What does it take to implement CCM in our enterprise?
CCM can be installed in any enterprise with zero disruption and minimal access requirements (only requiring “Read Only” access to AWS, Azure, or other platform cost files.)

7. What are the key analyses performed in CCM?
CCM provides a spend analytics solution that allows you to analyze Budget and Spend dollars by different hierarchies (Location, Line of business, Applications, Accounts etc.) These integrated analytics and drill-down capabilities combined with predictive algorithms provide for cloud analysis capabilities traditionally not available to organizations.

“Organizations that lack plans to track and monitor cloud costs overspend by an average of 40%. In fact, many companies end up spending way too much to make the move online – because they don’t realize what the shift entails.”
Ed Anderson, Gartner Analyst

8. How reliable are the recommendations from CCM?
CCM provides multi-layer recommendations “out-of-the-box”. These recommendations are based on the customer’s cumulative cost history, our experience, and lastly AI-based recommendations. At least 85% of all provided recommendations are without any human intervention. Based on a conservative average, CCM has been proven to provide continuous and significant savings on annual cloud spend.

9. What is the support model for CCM?
The CCM solution includes annual support which provides coverage for traditional product maintenance, feature enhancements, and a fixed number of hours for customizations or additional report development. Support is initiated through a dedicated email address with defined SLA’s.

10. How can CCM insights and recommendations be made actionable?
CCM provides an alerts mechanism to enable appropriate warnings based on burn rate. Additionally, and by design, CCM recommendations should be reviewed by an architect or administrator before incorporating them for individual platforms.

Want to learn more? Make smarter decisions and achieve better outcomes.

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Migrating your business to the cloud can be costly, especially if you don’t have a strategic plan to approach the migration. Both business and IT must thoughtfully consider what they want to move to the cloud and how to avoid making costly mistakes. As we all know too well, any technical challenge can be overcome by throwing money at it but that doesn’t make for a sensible cloud migration strategy but that doesn’t make for a sensible cloud migration strategy. Mapping a strategy before you begin your migration will put you in a far better position to optimize your cloud investments without breaking the bank.

Things to consider when migrating to the cloud.

It is important to decide how you want to use the cloud. Take time to understand the advantages cloud computing can offer your organization, which deployment model best fits your needs (whether it be infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, or software-as-a-service), how you want to approach cloud security and, most importantly, who will manage your cloud services. Based on industry statistics and customer feedback, we’re seeing more than a third of all cloud efforts fail and more than three-quarters of migration projects take longer than a year.

It also is common for enterprise IT staff to experience an unexpected learning curve or misalignment with the finance or business team’s investment objectives. Without a migration and spend monitoring plan, companies can expect to see approximately 35% of waste from unused cloud resources and unchecked expenditure. And, let’s face it, no cloud provider wants to provide you with a solution that shrinks your environment or that leads to less spend with them every year.

By strategically plotting out your migration strategy and preparing for the most common cloud challenges, you will be better able to implement your cloud environment, minimize waste, and optimize cloud spend and revenue.

Why CCM?

The rapid advancement of cloud-based data and analytics technology creates new opportunities and new challenges. Most organizations nowadays use multiple cloud vendors and/or platforms and struggle with complex billing. When organizations lack a unified view of their cloud spend, they struggle to realize expected cost savings and spend significant time and effort allocating cloud spend to user groups or departments. Overshooting cloud budget is a recurring theme at almost all enterprises post initial migration to the cloud.

Experts agree that cloud spend is on the rise with estimates projecting accelerating growth in 2021 and beyond. Embarking on a cloud journey without a plan for monitoring your cloud spend will guarantee suboptimal results.

To realize the greatest return, organizations today need a tool to help them monitor their cloud-based investments in a single view. Most organizations are dealing with multiple cloud providers and platforms and must unify data from various inputs, including AWS, Azure, Snowflake, Databricks, etc. They also need a clear understanding of the changing costs of a dynamic infrastructure across services, timeframes, and more. Only then can an organization confidently predict and control its cloud spend.

Our Cloud Cost Monitor, what we call CCM, is an on-prem, fixed-fee solution designed specifically to help organizations, like yours, monitor and optimize their cloud spend. CCM affords you the ability to add up to 10 clouds under the same license and incremental cloud environments without paying a percentage of your overall annual cloud spend. With features such as cost tagging, analytics, and a Python AI recommendation engine, CCM enables smart governance and insights that can help you understand, analyze, and predict your complex cloud spend.

See CCM in action: https://www.infocepts.ai/webinars-and-videos/cloud-cost-monitor-by-infocepts/

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As companies mature and find themselves with growing needs for more capable or more pervasive business intelligence throughout their user base, sooner or later they will have a need to migrate their analytical applications from one business intelligence (BI) platforms to another.

What motivations does a business have to migrate their BI tools?

The reasons that motivate these migrations are quite varied and range from moving away from manual analytical processes that take a long time to produce, to consolidating a large array of tools that drain company resources in licensing, maintenance and operational costs. Other companies may try to take advantage of more modern capabilities, such as visual data exploration or even dip their toe into Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine learning (ML) to Natural Language Querying. You might even have the systems generate analytical application automatically, using Natural Language Generation.

Whatever the motivation, there will most likely be hard work ahead, business processes that need to be protected from the disruption of a migration, and there will be expectations to be met, both from existing stakeholders and potentially new stakeholders, who will be motivated by the promise of what the new BI platform and the applications that can be built on it can bring.

What team is responsible for BI migrations?

While the need to migrate from one BI tool to another will most likely be driven by business goals, and business users, the technical teams responsible for the migration will not always have the complete picture of what these desired goals and outcomes are that drove the migration in the first place.

It is for this reason that we recommend beginning any migration effort with gathering consensus, and aligning all stakeholders on what the migrated application should be like. How is it going to meet the expectations of advanced capabilities, improved user experience or reduced total cost and reduced time to value for the applications that will be built on the new platform.

It is also important to understand what are the positive processes in place that should be maintained from the current way of doing things. If the migration is from a manual approach of generating reports and analytics, the migration team may be in luck as there is not much of a precedent in terms of functionality and performance and the BI platform will be perceived as leaps and bounds of progress compared to the previous way of doing things. However, if as in most cases, there is an incumbent BI Platform, there may be more risk to the migration.

What common problems can occur in a business intelligence migration project?

There will be users of any system who are comfortable with the way they use and consume their analytics, and at times, many iterations to optimize performance and the data model have taken place that may not be suited to the new platform. Worse, sometimes the new platform does not support scalability features, such as application partitioning or more sophisticated data volume management. This can happen when the team that identified the need for a migration prioritized front end visualization or ease of use and leave some of the performance and scalability issues to be resolved by the technical teams implementing the migration.

Another common source of challenges is when a technical team is given extremely tight deadlines, and this pushes re-utilization of existing data models and backends that may not suit the new platform optimally. Whenever this happens, an application can be built, but it may not be received as well because it will have increased the complexity of the systems or be forced to work with a data model that is not optimized for it and performance issues may be seen.

There have been books written on the subject of “What You Know Can Hurt You”, in this case, this is analogous to “The data model that you have can break your BI System”. It is therefore important to do as much as possible to build the migrated application in a way that allows for backend analysis and updates to ensure that the front-end application will run as efficiently as possible. It is easy to see that for greenfield applications, this problem would not be there.

What strategies are worth investing in for a successful BI migration?

Nonetheless, it is possible to manage through this landscape with a properly managed and proven migration methodology. One of the most important milestones of the migration project is to generate a clear picture of the desired end state and share it with key stakeholders to the project to set expectations correctly both for the end system and for the required support and resources that will be needed, identify barriers to overcome and align project goals.

If working with the right partner, there may be an opportunity to use different assets and accelerators that can both save time and increase the quality of the migrated platform. The ability to generate automated metadata reports and analyze the existing applications can be a great time saver, as well as the ability to automate testing and data quality for more efficiently moving through the acceptance phases can also be of great value.

As it should be clear by now, there can be perils in the path to BI platform migration, but with the correct risk mitigation strategies and correct partnerships, your company can do a great deal to maximize their chances of success and realizing the promise of improved functionality and access to the Analytical Applications that enable the daily business processes.

What have you learned from past BI Migrations?

Let’s take a look at a past migration we did for an American mass media company. We partnered with them to migrate and optimize their analytics tool portfolio to enable self-service, simplify operations, and reduce overall total cost of ownership (TCO). They wanted to consolidate their BI applications to achieve improved insights, maintenance reduction, and a superior user experience. However, they faced a common challenge of what tool to choose. There has been a recent explosion of available BI tools from MicroStrategy to Tableau to Domo to Business Objects to Power BI and others.

To solve this first challenge our team researched and evaluated many of the BI platforms in use to understand its supported business processes. We then provided a thorough cost analysis to the primary platform owners. It detailed licensing, maintenance, and infrastructure to reveal its true TCO. In evaluating platforms and applications that would be migrated— coupled with the expected savings and estimated project duration—we used this information to garner support for a platform consolidation effort.

Over the next 12 months we helped our client redesign, optimize, and migrate over 1000 reports and dashboards across five BI platforms. These supported sales, operations, and CXO reporting, as well as delivered a platform that provides self-service capabilities. Through this BI migration our customer saved over $1M, was able to reallocate personnel and infrastructure, reduced costs, and accelerated its overall time to value.

How can a data and analytics partner like Infocepts help in our BI Migration?

Many enterprises are challenged with high technical debt of legacy BI platforms and overlapping analytic capabilities. Enterprises want to modernize their platforms to reduce cost, be more agile, and to provide better user experiences. But migration of BI platforms is often a complex process, involves change, can pose a business risk and disruption.  Hence, migration to a new platform requires meticulous planning, thoughtful rationalization, intuitive design and execution excellence.

Infocepts is a one stop shop solution for customers who want to migrate their databases, ingestion, and/or BI and analytics tools using a proven repeatable approach. We have the expertise to make assessments, trace data, recommend cutover paths, and manage change results in the best migration strategy. In our rich experiences of large-scale projects for enterprise customers. We have applied best practices, solution accelerators, and cross-functional experts to automate the process and deliver predictable results with operational flexibility—all while avoiding unnecessary costs and hassles.

Want to learn more about the Infocepts D&A Platform Migration?

Infocepts is a data solutions firm which uses services to drive business outcomes with data and analytics. Through a solution-oriented approach, we guide the modernization efforts of our customers, enabling them to make truly ‘data-driven’ decisions so your users can make smarter decisions and businesses can achieve better outcomes.

To find out how Infocepts can help you during your business intelligence migration and beyond, connect with one of our experts directly.

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