Category: On the Road

At the inaugural AWS re:Inforce event in Boston, we met a wide range of attendees: teams not yet in AWS to seasoned veterans with a large number of cloud workloads. Regardless of maturity, many visitors to our booth struggled with one or more cloud anti-patterns preventing them from securely scaling operations:

• All your eggs in a single AWS basket: instead of using one account, take a multi-account approach to your cloud workloads. Using multiple accounts gives you fine-grained control, better visibility, and a smaller blast radius in the event of an issue.
• Guardians at the gate: you will struggle to scale if one person or team is a ‘gate’ in front of working in the cloud. Delegate the ability to provision and manage accounts.
• Departments of ‘No’: build consensus, not silos. Put in place – and automate – compliance policies and budget enforcement so teams can safely and autonomously get work done.

At the event, we teamed with AWS to talk about positive patterns such as delegation, decentralization, and stewardship. We also shared customer stories in the session Unify security, compliance, and finance teams with governance at scale. Discover more about tackling cloud anti-patterns in the replay.

For help establishing positive cloud patterns, check our our blog post How to Make the Cloud Culture Shift.

And, if you’re interested in learning more about unifying IT and Finance, check out this recent blog from Mark Schwartz at AWS, The CFO and CIO: Partners in Success.

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Marianna leads marketing at cloudtamer.io.

The AWS show season has truly kicked off.  A couple weeks ago we were in Washington, DC at the AWS Public Sector Summit. This week we’re in Boston at the inaugural AWS re:Inforce event.

Last year’s Public Sector Summit was our first sponsor experience with AWS. This year it was gratifying to encounter so many booth visitors who had heard of cloudtamer.io and meet our customers who’ve adopted cloudtamer.io over the past year. We count many public sector agencies as customers so it was great to meet those using cloudtamer.io to help with their cloud governance needs.

We partnered with one of our customers – NASA – and AWS to present Reimagine the Public Cloud Experience with AWS Governance@Scale during the Summit. We’re helping several groups within NASA; this particular session highlighted the team responsible for earth science data collections. As you can imagine, this team manages a large volume of data and is expecting rapid growth over the next several years. NASA shared their experience establishing a cloud platform infrastructure and using cloudtamer.io for account management, role-based access control, and budget enforcement. Hear their story, and details on how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is also using cloudtamer.io, in the session video.

During the Summit, we also presented Do Your Cloud Users Keep You Up At Night? 5 Keys to Better Rest. This session highlighted our experience helping one of our customers address the worries we see many times in organizations: things like controlling spend, balancing control and agility, and deprovisioning users. Check out the session slides for tips on resting easy in the cloud.

We’ll be sharing more customer stories on stage at AWS re:Inforce – stay tuned for the recap!

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Marianna leads marketing at cloudtamer.io.

So, after a few days to decompress from the massive event that was AWS re:Invent 2018, we’re back to share some takeaways and highlights from our booth on the expo floor.

You Can ReWatch (or Watch for the First Time)

First, if you missed the event (or just want a refresher), here’s Re:Watch, a great resource from @ryan_sb to help you sort and search sessions from re:Invent 2018.

Governance@Scale Draws a Crowd

Both offerings of the AWS Governance@Scale session were packed.

While this session wasn’t recorded, a Slideshare is available. And you can check out a Governance@Scale session, which was recorded earlier this year at the AWS Public Sector Summit and features a case study from our customer at NASA.

AWS has just updated their AWS Governance@Scale whitepaper too.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Governance

Apart from the noise of the expo floor causing several folks to hear ‘government’ when we said ‘governance’, there was some confusion around the topic of governance. I heard: Isn’t that just security or compliance? Do you mean data governance? Just what is governance?

I think it helped to explain it in basic terms: people, budget, and security. When we talked to booth visitors about these ‘pillars of governance’ you could see these were common issues of real concern. Especially as cloud accounts and cloud users grow, organizations face challenges:

• • Determining the state of all cloud users and their access rights across the enterprise – and properly deprovisioning these users when needed.
  • Ensuring adherence to IT budgets in a pay-as-you-go cloud model.
  • Remaining confident that the organization’s cloud presence is compliant with relevant legal or regulatory policies.

Governance comes down to people, budget, and security. Visitors to our booth were looking for help with these basics of governance within AWS and other public cloud providers.

Do you see one of your challenges in this list of 10 Signs You Might Need Cloud Governance?

Doing Good and Having Fun

Who doesn’t love a raffle?! While we raffled an uber-Amazon gift card (just in time for the holidays!), we also included an Adopt a Tiger donation kit from the World Wildlife Fund. The kit includes a stuffed tiger (on a larger scale than our in-booth offering), and our lucky winner said he has children, so the tiger will find a happy home. More importantly, the prize puts dollars toward helping a threatened species. (Holiday gift anyone?)

How Do You Work With/Compare To ….

Finally, given the large number of AWS services – and the new services announced during the event – many visitors to our booth had questions regarding how cloudtamer.io is similar to/different from native AWS offerings. In upcoming blog posts, we’ll talk about offerings like AWS Organizations, AWS Landing Zones, and others and share some similarities and differences.

If you missed us at the show, email us to connect and talk cloud governance.

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Marianna leads marketing at cloudtamer.io.

We recently partnered with AWS to host a webinar on how to go from manual to automated cloud governance.

Organizations typically run into a need for governance as cloud use grows and they start asking questions like:

• • How do I determine the current state of all cloud users and control their access across my enterprise?
  • How do I ensure adherence to IT budgets in a pay-per-use model?
  • How do I ensure deployments and operations are compliant with relevant legal, regulatory, and contractual policies?

The old way of getting answers – expending labor hours, manually tracking cloud accounts and users via spreadsheets, and storing policies in binders – can’t keep up with the pace of cloud adoption.

Cloud governance at scale requires automation

The governance@scale model that AWS highlighted in the webinar can help customers retire manual processes and replace labor with automation to:

• • Provision and map accounts to your organization structure
  • Enforce budget actions to prevent cost overruns
  • Deploy accounts consistent with policies such as NIST and HIPAA

The cloudtamer.io solution can help you achieve cloud governance@scale across account management, budget enforcement, and compliance automation.

Start retiring your spreadsheets

To learn more best practices – and retire your spreadsheets – watch the replay of Retire the Spreadsheet and Accelerate Adoption with Automated Cloud Governance.

 

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Marianna is the cloudtamer.io Product Marketing Manager.

We’re a Silver Sponsor at the AWS Public Sector Summit at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC on June 20 and 21. This event is our big reveal of cloudtamer.io.

Our booth is near the Cloud Lounge on the expo floor – an easy detour on your way to a comfy chair or a device recharge.

In addition to the cloudtamer.io elves staffing the booth, you can find our team presenting at the following sessions:

• • • Wednesday, 8:40am: cloudtamer.io Overview, Demo Lab Theater
    • Thursday, 12:00pm: Balancing Control and Agility to Achieve Cloud@Scale, Partner Theater
    • Wednesday, 1:50-2:40pm: Governance@scale – Governance of Multi-Account, Large-Scale AWS Environments Using an Automated Approach; with AWS and NASA, Room 151 A

   

• If you’ll be at the show, stop by for all things cloud governance, fun giveaways (like this little guy), and an entry into our raffle for a bigger giveaway at show end.

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Marianna is the cloudtamer.io Product Marketing Manager.