Evolving Beyond Conventional Tooling

At ePlus, we’re fortunate to talk to a wide variety of organizations around their use of Microsoft Azure.  It’s absolutely one of my favorite parts of the job.  A frequent topic that comes up in conversation is our approach to deliver ePlus Cloud Managed Services for Azure using proprietary tools. Being dependent on external tools can delay the consumption of new Azure features or services at times, whereas ePlus can quickly expand our tooling to accommodate.   We’re not forced to wait to see how it fits into someone else’s roadmap.

As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), there are three large sets of tools—two of which are very challenging to develop on your own.

• The first is deployment tooling.  How will you deploy new resources?  This can be straightforward or quite involved depending on approach and desire, especially if you support both IaC and non-IaC approaches at the same time.


• The second is around cost optimization.  An MSP needs strong tooling in this space to help organizations drive cost-effective use in the cloud.  Microsoft provides a good start with built-in recommendations, but most MSPs buy commercial tools in this space and there are several strong options, some of which we’ve used in the past ourselves.
  
  When we originally looked at launching our own Managed Services offering for Azure, our senior staff examined the various commercial offerings and unfortunately found most of them were lacking in one or more areas we deemed important.  A prime example is the ability to right size PaaS offerings, which incidentally has driven our largest cost savings to date.  Many of them also conflict with the existing Microsoft recommendations or lack context.  We decided we’d have to build our own instead.


• The third set of tools is around governance.  Again, an MSP needs effective tooling in this space.  This is another area where Microsoft has strong offerings such as Azure Policy and MS Defender for Cloud.  Most MSPs look to take this further and buy or subscribe to a commercial Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool.
  
  ePlus has heavy experience in this space, and this is another situation where no commercial tool does everything we want.  In particular, most CSPMs work across a huge variety of cloud offerings but don’t provide the depth of context or information needed to quickly remediate issues if they’re discovered in any particular cloud.

It’s no secret that ePlus is a large entity with a proud record of helping customers in a variety of technology needs, and our Cloud MSP component is a relatively small piece of the larger portfolio.  One of the great things about starting a new business unit at an already successful company is you can afford to invest in areas that perhaps others can’t.  We took the time while in our formative months to write our own approach to cost optimization and governance.  From our experiences in professional services, we had some early generation tools to build from, but it was still a heavy investment in time and resources.

This flexibility gives us the ability to do some unique things in both FinOps and governance that differentiate our offering and help us strive to make organizations succeed in cloud.  It also means that we don’t have to ask our customers to subscribe to external services.  This gives us cost savings we can pass on and full control over the tooling—as well as an approach to governance allows us to drive remediation at a rapid pace.  This is crucial as we assess many environments with both high severity and large quantities of issues.  Our ability to control costs allows our customers to experience the benefits of cloud at a reasonable cost.

Have questions or comments?  Feel free to contact us directly at ecms@eplus.com anytime. Be sure to check out the full ePlus Cloud Managed Services blog.  Happy Clouds!