Global law firm gains complete visibility of their multi-cloud environments with Vitado by Certero
This customer is the manager of Technology, Process and Standards at global law firm. He works closely with change control, finance teams and the CIO, creating and monitoring IT governance processes and often explaining why things are the way they are.
Transitioning to a cloud-first strategy with the goal of migrating all on-prem server workloads to Azure by the end of 2022, has certainly created challenges; technical, financial and cultural as the business gets to grips with not just how workloads can be technically migrated to the cloud, but also how does the business manage and optimize these premium resources as valuable business assets? How do they make sure that the cloud-first strategy is beneficial to the business financially as well as supporting agility? How do they make sure they’re doing the right thing?
Company Overview
Sector: Legal Services
Devices: 4000
Location: Global
Product: Vitado
Whilst the shift is still very much a maturing work in progress, one of the things that has helped to provide clarity is having the Vitado multi-cloud management solution to enabling centralized visibility of what’s actually happening, as the customer explains:
Cloud can get out of control very quickly. We’re mainly focusing on Azure but we do have some AWS resources as well that we’re actively scaling-down. Having all our cloud resources visible in Vitado is much easier as it gives us that single pane of glass visibility of all our cloud environments, all of our spend. We’re not having to always go somewhere else to get data – Vitado is a one-stop-shop for that information.
Controlling Cloud Costs
Information from Vitado is used to support the cross-functional communication that cloud requires, with users ranging from finance, management, IT and the CIO, directly accessing Vitado dashboard reports to get a view of cloud spending.
“We can see within Vitado where costs may be ramping up and finance have alerts for when resources are getting close to budget” the customer explains.
This is valuable insight that would never be accessible via the vendor portals alone.
“The cost-savings we’ve discovered by identifying unused resources easily provides an ROI for Vitado”.
Controlling Cloud Governance
Clearly, Azure costs need to be justified and making sure that cloud doesn’t get our out of control is just as important for the customer – a fresh challenge as many traditional business practices require re-defining now that ‘ownership’ has changed.
“Seeing cloud from an asset management perspective has changed – we don’t own these assets, they’re not financially depreciating, yet they do represent an expense for which we need to make sure the business is attaining value. They need to be controlled and optimized”.
He continues: “we created an extensive 25-piece tagging strategy to ensure Azure resources can be accounted for and Vitado enables us to easily monitor how well we adhere to our own policies and processes. Vitado helps us meet our own expectations with the cloud”.
Having this next-level insight has highlighted where the gaps are within the business to govern cloud.
A Hybrid View
The global law firm also use the Certero platform to provide visibility of IT hardware and software, everywhere. As Vitado is available on the Certero platform, it can bridge the gap between cloud and on-prem asset management, particularly useful for understanding software licensing, BYOL and the transition of on-premise costs and assets to the cloud.
“It would be interesting to see a true total-cost comparison of running servers on-prem against the cost of running them in Azure” concludes the customer.
“We’re committed to the cloud and there’s obvious scale and agility benefits. Vitado is going to help us make sure our governance and policies are followed as we progress and mature our cloud asset management”.