Insights
SPLA Compliance: why it matters more than ever
Microsoft has announced price increases for the SPLA licensing program. Find out which products are affected and how Crayon can help you adapt before new prices take effect in January, 2025.
A clear way to control cloud costs
The spectacular growth of public cloud services shows little sign of easing. The intent for small to medium sized businesses to adopt cloud and/or pursue a multi-cloud strategy into 2025 is surging across the region.
There’s never been a better time for partners to be on the front foot when it comes to controlling and optimising cloud costs for their customers. Crayon has decades of experience in helping its largest clients to achieve total IT cost optimisations, and that expertise is now available to our partners.
Crayon’s channel team can tap into our global pool of more than 400 consultants worldwide, all of whom live and breathe optimisation as a discipline.
We’ll work with you to gain a full understanding of your customers’ existing cloud software and infrastructure. By building a picture of their cloud operations, we’ll enable you to proactively identify where the estate you have under management (or would like to have) could be better optimised.
Cloud cost optimisation disciplines and services provide a competitive edge. Offering a cloud cost optimisation assessment supports new business opportunities and builds increased trust with existing customers.
Leverage our proven capabilities and help your customers to strategically reinvest savings into technology projects that drive increased value for them, and you.
Cloud Cost Optimisation Assessment
A proven method for discovering hidden savings opportunities and increasing the value of cloud investments.
Complexity in the cloud is a fact of life. It’s the price to be paid for the agility and flexibility it offers. Yet, partners and customers alike can wrestle with the increased costs that come with expanded cloud use.
Our services are geared toward making sense of what drives increased costs. We do the heavy lifting on the deep analysis, so you can be proactive with recommendations and solutions that are easily understood, even by your most non-technical of customers.
A Crayon Cloud Cost Optimisation Assessment is a tried and proven process for reviewing the overall cost-effectiveness of a cloud environment.
Assessments cover resource allocation, data storage, billing models, and governance policies. Analysis of cloud billing data, usage patterns, and cost drivers is used to identify and position recommendations to create savings, reduce wastage and improve the value of the cloud environment.
What we do
Evaluate their resources
Even customers with the best service partners can end up purchasing more computing power in the cloud than they need. We’ll work with you to identify where there may be hidden costs piling up, including orphaned resources no longer used or needed by services. These include unattached disks, unused public IP addresses and load balancers, all of which can lead to increased cost and security risk.
Rightsize their applications
It’s not hard for Reserved Instances (RI) to accumulate, especially in customer environments where there are a high number of applications with steady usage. Left unmonitored, too much RI capacity at the wrong price can result in underutilised instances. Our services identify SKUs/plans to match actual usage patterns of your workloads to avoid over-provisioning and under-utilisation of instances.
Review cloud storage
Under or over provisioning of cloud storage can be a challenge for businesses of all sizes. Whether your customers need less or more, we can help you to identify the best options to control unit pricing, including where multi-vendor solutions could better optimise outcomes on Azure or AWS. We consider storage options for different types of data such as leveraging cold or archive tiers or enabling compression to reduce costs.
Consolidate small agreements
The nature of cloud consumption makes it easy for licences and subscriptions to be purchased by customers directly, often on small agreements with the same vendor. Leverage our licensing expertise to start a conversation about consolidation led savings.
Optimise licensing
Not all licenses qualify for Hybrid Benefits, and it can be a complex process to understand and execute properly for your customers. We’ll identify investments where there may be dual-rights usage, any regional price differences or move to free tier options that could provide additional efficiency and cost benefits. If you are an ISV or SaaS partner, we’ll check that available Dev/Test options are being fully utilised.
Automate and Improve
Every partner knows a customer that has cloud resources working unnecessary overtime. Show your customers how effective estate management can save them money, and you could expand your opportunities to bring more under management. Our assessment considers where scheduling and auto-scaling could be leveraged to automate starting, stopping, or scaling instances appropriately, whether optimal use is made of reserved instances and spot instances, or alternative services such as Content Distribution Networks.
Implement Cloud FinOps foundations
Assessments offer partners a low-risk way to get the cost optimisation conversation started with customers and leaves you with a clear set of actionable recommendations.
Beyond this, we can support partners in the following areas:
Implement recommendations
Right-size resources, consolidate and co-host resources as identified, apply for reserved instances, tweak SKUs and plans, add auto-scaling rules, implement automation, deploy new services or migrate to alternative cloud services.
Resource migration
Migrate resources to new subscriptions (Azure only) to leverage dev/test pricing and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) reseller rates.
Governance and policies
Enable budgets, monitoring, cost alerts, dashboards, tagging strategies, and policies to enforce cost compliance.
Together, we can help establish the foundations for the addition of well-rounded, sustainable, and profitable Cloud FinOps service offerings in your business.
Advanced Cost Optimisation
Delivering customer outcomes beyond the cloud environment
Successfully proving the value of cloud cost optimisation can lead to opportunities to expand services to the whole IT estate. Crayon has a range of additional IT Cost Optimisation services that can be brought to bear for our partners and their customers.
These include specific offerings that can be tabled ahead of Enterprise Agreement renewals and a range of flexible engagement terms, including gain-share models.
If you have an active opportunity beyond the cloud environment, get in touch to explore where we may be able to support.
FAQs
An ideal customer looks like this:
- Spends $5k – $30k/month on cloud resource consumption but there is no maximum size to optimise
- Can therefore expect that fees associated with the assessment are recouped within several months (assuming 20% savings)
- Azure, AWS, or both
How it works with Crayon:
- We run a workshop with the customer
- We investigate customer environment identifying cost optimization opportunities via manual and automated processes
- We provide a detailed action plan: actionable recommendations for cost savings and optimization
- We can implement recommendations as an additional activity/fee
We connect your tenants to a dashboard that analyses their cloud spend, and our internal experts run in-depth reviews of utilisation and consumption patterns. We then present findings to you, along with a detailed set of actionable recommendations for cost savings and optimisation.
Engagement beyond that point is up to our partners. We can provide strategic counsel on positioning recommendations to your customers, work with you to implement agreed changes and help you to develop continued GTMs to expand your footprint in this service arena.
1-2 weeks, depending on environment size.
Price point varies but average including partner markup is sub $20k. Average margin is 20%. To understand the long-term revenue potential beyond the assessment itself, get in touch with your Crayon rep or complete the inquiry form on this page, and we’ll be in touch.
Set up a time to discuss Crayon Services
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