What is our primary use case?
Usually, it is used by large companies with a high amount of cloud spend. Something like more than 5 million dollars a year. And, usually, we face multi-cloud challenges.
How has it helped my organization?
The list of optimizations that are proposed by Cloudability has been most effective in reducing cloud expenditure for our customers. Another one is the capacity to deep dive into the consumption and be able, in a very easy way, to analyze your issues or peaks of traffic, something like that, to explain what you should investigate.
What is most valuable?
I like its ability to create, in a very easy way, relevant dashboards. Secondly, all the tagging and mapping, which helps to create some virtual tags. And, all the forecast and budget features, that allow creating, for each user or application owner, their own budget in a very friendly way.
What needs improvement?
The first one is, how to help users, especially practitioners, stick to their commitment plan. For example, how can I use Cloudability to help me optimize my selling plan and my residential plan?
The second feature I'd like to see is a combination of cost visualization and a sustainability approach. I want to see how much cost I consume in the cloud and what my CO2 footprint is.
So, cost visualization and a sustainability approach are the two things I would like.
I would improve the integration, or the preparation of the integration, for a complex environment. I think that we usually assume, "Well, this is easy to integrate." In a very complex optimization, this can become very complex. This is where I think we need to be much more prepared, with up-to-date points, to evaluate the complexity of the landing zone or the account to connect. We also need to make sure that we put all the requirements in front of the customer to make sure that we don't fail in the integration.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for three years.
I only have one subscription. I always work with the latest version because this is a unique SaaS environment.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. I don't have an issue with the stability itself. As, this is not a tool that has a strong impact on your productivity. If stability is out for one, two, three, four hours, it will not affect your business.
So it's stable, but if there were any outages, it still wouldn't affect.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I haven't reached the limit of the scale of scalability. So, there are the number, the volume of assets, or the volume of data to acquire in terms of the number of days of consumption you acquired. We
I'm not connected with a customer who has reached any limitations. Our customers are mostly mid-size companies.
How was the initial setup?
If you deal with a very large cloud environment with multiple accounts and so on, it can be complex sometimes due to some issues with admin rights.
However, if you deal with a single cloud environment that is very simple in terms of structure, the integration of Cloudability is straightforward.
For example, if you want to acquire all the cost data of a very large company and you have access directly to the higher, privileged accounts, there's no issue. If you want the same company to acquire or use Cloudability just for a subsidiary that is fully dependent on the parent company, it's starting to be complex.
In a very easy, straightforward approach, it can take two, three days to get the data into Cloudability. But if we face a more difficult integration with some problems of security, account privilege, and so on, it can take a couple of weeks.
First, we analyze the scope to be integrated. Then, we define, in the hierarchy of the cloud structure, what we will integrate. Next, we do all the design in terms of how we can access the data, or if there are any security rules that don't allow us to acquire all the data.
Then, we proceed to the integration, which means we create all the repository buckets in the cloud environment and then activate the API to collect the data. That's the integration process.
Last but not least, is to create, with the customer or the users, all the basic structure in terms of creating the accounts in the product, creating the first dashboard, all these things that lead to releasing an environment that is ready to use, to the users.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is very cheap and ten is very expensive. Pricing is one of the main issues we face. Cloudability is actually expensive, and it's quite difficult to promote Cloudability to some customers or clients who have a small structure or who have not budgeted to acquire Cloudability.
The price of the license or the usage is a percentage of the top consumption. So it varies from year to year. And, if you are a large customer with a significant amount of consumption, proportionally, Cloudability will be expensive. So the more you use, the more you pay.
What other advice do I have?
Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten because now I expect to be able to have maybe something that is less expensive or reduce the number of features to benefit the main features and maybe pay later for all this.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud