The Doppler Quarterly Fall 2016 | Page 67

proactive understanding of what occurs during an audit and provide assurance that the information will be up-to-date and waiting for the auditors in a consumable package. Continuous Cost Control A key aspect of continuous compliance is Continuous Cost Control. As you can see in Figure 3, this means that we understand the costs around the use of cloud. Cloud computing has a big advantage in that we only pay for what we use. We have the advantage of only paying for computer resources we leverage, and do not have to purchase hardware and software ahead of need. Client However, cost overruns are commonplace when leveraging public clouds and it is important to understand that there is a difference between “good cloud spend” and “bad cloud spend.” Good cloud spends includes things like rapid adoption and use of new cloud services (AWS Lambda, Aurora, etc) that provide better ROI and decrease time to market. Bad cloud spend includes chatty apps and wasteful spending (not parking Dev / Test instances when they’re not in use). Bad cloud spend is most often generated by organizations and teams that do not understand the best consumption patterns and compliance tools required for optimizing cloud workloads. When you over-provision cloud resources or your developers simply forget to shut down their no-longer-needed resources, your cloud bill will be many times higher than it should be. Continuous Cost Controls helps you quickly determine which cloud spend is good vs. bad and remediate as necessary. Client Baseline Data Configurable Modules CTP & 3rd Party Tooling CTP Assess and Plan Phase of CAP • Client Configuration • TCO / ROI Models • CTP Tools Dashboard Reporting • Alerts • Continuous Monitoring Optimization • Recommendations • Continuous Improvements Cost Reporting Tools Figure 3: Continuous Cost Controls - Data Aggregation FALL 2016 | THE DOPPLER | 65