Cloud Comrade Enhances Cloud Service Offerings with Xi Beam

INDUSTRY

Service Provider

BENEFITS

• Provide peace of mind to customers with comprehensive list of automated security checks and compliance policies like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, CIS etc.
• One-click fixes to easily remove underutilized resources such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, old snapshots, etc.
• Single view across multiple cloud accounts unifies cloud operations
• Comprehensive tool to assess health signals for cost, security as well as compliance issues
• Achieved between 20-40% in cloud cost savings for most of their customers
• Generate easy to understand reports for their customers

SOLUTION

• Xi Beam by Nutanix
  
• Applications: Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud offerings
  

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Cloud Comrade is a leader in providing technology solutions that enterprises need to migrate smoothly and securely manage public cloud solutions. Xi Beam (Beam), a cloud governance service by Nutanix, provides multi-cloud security compliance to help Cloud Comrade identify and fix their customers’ security vulnerabilities across multiple cloud accounts. Beam delivers visibility, optimization, and control over cloud security compliance, enabling Cloud Comrade to streamline its customer’s migration to the cloud.

CHALLENGE

Cloud Comrade is a Singapore-based, enterprise-focused, cloud computing consultancy serving approximately 200 customers in the region. They build bespoke IT solutions and helps customers migrate existing workloads to public cloud, carefully assessing the workload environment and providing best practices for managing cost, security and compliance issues.

Mission-critical workloads go first

“We are seeing trends where cloud has become the core IT strategy to drive businesses, and companies are prioritizing the move of mission-critical workloads like SAP,” said Waroma.

Customers more concerned with security and audit compliance

“Although cost is a significant consideration, our customers are actually more concerned with compliance, security automation, transparency, and understanding that their systems are being kept in a way that adheres to their requirements and ensures business continuity,” said Waroma. “Public sector, financial services, and healthcare organizations often have very specific compliance mandates, and large enterprises also have their own internal IT policies that they must adhere to.”

SOLUTION

As a managed services provider, Cloud Comrade sought a solution that could help streamline their workflow in managing all their customers’ Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts, providing health check status for their cloud security and compliance as well as helping to maintain cloud costs under control.

As one of the first few customers of Beam, they had been pleased with the product even after comparing Beam with the newer market entrants. “We realized that Beam has everything that we need and more, and there is no reason for us to look anywhere else,” said Waroma. “The ease of use and functionality has saved us a tremendous amount of time,” added Muadz Abdurrohman, Head of Consulting, Indonesia.

CUSTOMER OUTCOME

One tool to manage cloud governance for their entire customer base

Cloud Comrade manages the public cloud setup of their customers and provides a health check conducted using Beam to assess their security compliance against industry standards and cloud best practices. “Beam allows us to spot misconfigurations, open ports or other issues which we need our clients to agree on fixing before we can take them on as a customer. There were several situations where we impressed the customer this way,” said Jeremy Scott Yeo, Customer Engagement Director.

Peace of mind with continuous security compliance

With 250+ cloud security checks and built-in regulatory compliance policies like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, CIS etc., Cloud Comrade can automate a comprehensive list of security checks for all its customers. Using Beam’s continuous scanning approach, Cloud Comrade is able to identify and immediately alert their customers about any critical security vulnerabilities that needed fixing immediately.

Monthly reports on security checks and cost savings up to 40%

“Custom reports are one of the most highly valued features of Beam for our end-customers,” said Yeo. “Our monthly report card for our customers proves to them that we have kept their environment secure and in compliance with their security policies. Sometimes we get ad hoc requests for reports from our customers and with just a few clicks in Beam we can provide them the required level of visibility into their cloud environment.

For customers who are asking us to take over the management of their cloud resources, Beam’s cost reports are generally able to show about 20-40% in cost-saving opportunities.”

One-click-fix to shut down underutilized resources

“Beam can show us applied vs reserved situations and for one example, we noticed that the test environments are underutilized for a customer, so we used one-click fixes in Beam to shut down the servers for the test environments during certain times of the day when it is not in use, resulting in deep cost savings,” said Yeo.

A single view across all accounts saves considerable time

Beam provides the single-dashboard visibility that Cloud Comrade requires to easily optimize the cloud experience for all of its customers. “If we use native tools, we would need to have our team to be looking at 100 different screens and that is not feasible. That’s why we use Beam to consolidate the whole view across a single pane of glass,” said Waroma. “If there wasn’t a tool such as Beam we would definitely have to hire a few more permanent headcounts in order to handle the workload.”

NEXT STEPS

Cloud Comrade will be in close partnership with the Xi Beam product group in providing user feedback that will add more functionality for real-time fixing of security anomalies. Cloud Comrade also looks forward to the roll-out of Beam’s services to Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to expand their usage of Beam.