I have an MSP. Why do I need a cloud management platform?
We talk a lot about how Klarity helps optimise cloud operations and cloud spend. And we get a common follow-up comment/question: “My managed services provider takes care of lots of that. Why do I need a cloud management platform as well?”
The short answer is that when it comes to cloud management stuff – Klarity saves money and makes life easier. Plus, the MSP management is made much simpler. Here’s how.
Multi-cloud visibility…
You can use hyperscaler tools to monitor consumption on each cloud. But to control costs effectively, you need visibility across ALL your clouds in an accessible, comprehensible and easy-to-access way. The key benefit of Klarity – it’s a multi-cloud management platform with dashboards that consolidate assets and costs across Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform and on-prem VMware.
…with real-time reporting
You get the multi-cloud dashboard with real-time information, on demand. It’s not about looking at a monthly MSP report that’s already out of date. It’s about having access – in a couple of clicks – to the current state of play for all your clouds. This way, you can identify overspend and inefficiencies – and address them before they have a negative impact.
You can keep people accountable…
Using Klarity, it’s easy to keep everyone aligned and on top of what they need to do. There’s the financial accountability side, because Klarity gives saving suggestions and flags overspend. And there’s the operational accountability side, because everyone logging into Klarity can see exactly what anomalies are there to fix ( getting engineers to take action is the top challenge FinOps teams face).
You can then keep tabs on everyone. Is your MSP managing security? You can see if everything’s been done. Are teams eliminating those unused resources? You can see if they’re still eating up the budget.
…prompt people to take action…
This is huge for enterprises. If something’s wrong with a resource, figuring out who’s responsible for fixing it can take days. With Klarity, you can identify the person instantly, which makes for huge savings.
Here’s an example from an industrial company. Their MSP manages the back-ups. On one occasion, someone at the MSP made an honest mistake that changed a configuration. This meant a huge database was backing up 4 times a day instead of once causing a big spike in consumption for that DB. Klarity flagged it immediately, and in a couple of clicks showed who was responsible. He was pinged, confirmed it was a mistake and quickly fixed the issue. Job done.
Without Klarity, it would have taken a few days to figure out who was responsible for the DB – and during that time, the business would have racked up over $15,000 in costs. Klarity helps to avoid such costs completely.
…and easily enforce organisational rules and policies
There are a lot of cooks in the cloud soup – between your internal teams, your MSP(s) and any other external partners (e.g., development or engineering). With so many people involved, it can be hard to maintain governance.
In Klarity, you can set rules based on what’s decided by the FinOps team, CCoE, C-suite, etc. It then flags what’s not compliant. This ensures your MSPs and partners are always following your rules (and not their own).
For example, you can set a rule that anything not used for more than 30 days is considered waste. People responsible for resources will then be prompted to remove anything that meets the criterion or explain why it needs to stay. It doesn’t matter if the MSP works for 180 days with another enterprise. Klarity lets you know if people aren’t in line (bringing us back to the accountability part).
You + MSP + Klarity = a recipe for cloud management success
