Taming Cloud Cost Complexity: AWS Billing and Invoicing Strategies That Scale - CloudCheckr In order to run a successful AWS practice, you must manage costs, optimize spending, and automate billing to increase margins. Although AWS offers many useful tools to help with this, CloudCheckr provides a single pane of glass view across all activity within your environment—giving you the visibility and insights to make the most of your cloud spend. During this presentation, Director of Global Sales Elissa Livingston and Senior Account Executive Ashley Ernst will run through the following: - The biggest cost pitfalls public cloud users encounter - Common challenges with AWS invoicing - Strategic advice to increase margins while growing your business - Actionable tips to optimize cloud spend Speakers: Elissa Livingston, CloudCheckr Ashley Ernst, CloudCheckr

1. Taming Cloud Cost Complexity: AWS Billing and Invoicing Strategies That Scale
April 5th 2017
Elissa Livingston
Director of Global Sales
Ashley Ernst
Senior Account Executive

2. delivers a unified platform for
cloud management of public cloud environments,
providing the modern MSP or reseller with
advanced cost, security and automation capabilities.

3. Enterprise
Diverse
Customers
“CloudCheckr was the no-brainer solution for MediaMath’s team to bring unprecedented accountability, budgeting predictability and an improved security
posture to our AWS resources that has helped us further scale our AWS environment and saved us over $2 million dollars in annual costs.”

4. The CloudCheckr Solution
Cost
Management
Security &
Compliance
Inventory
Management
Automation

5. Common MSP and Reseller Challenges
MSP + Reseller Focus: Margin Enhancement, Invoicing/Billing and Customer Experience
 Multi-account Management
- Difficulty accommodating multi-level account
hierarchies
- Lack of demonstrable clarity and accountability
 Volume and complexity of raw billing data makes invoice
generation a convoluted, time-consuming process
 Narrow margins in a competitive market
 Customers desire varying levels of control, insight and
overall experience in cloud management.

6. Security & Compliance
Continuous improvement through continuous
monitoring for all of your customers’
deployments
• Total visibility of cloud infrastructure attack
surface
• Layers of protection for comprehensive state
and activity monitoring
• Security intelligence turns insight into actions
while meeting compliance demands
Asset
Inventory
Configuration
Audit &
Hardening
IAM User
Permission
Tracking
Event &
Change
Monitoring
Self-Healing
Automation
Network &
Perimeter
Assessment
400+ BEST PRACTICE
LIBRARY & ALERTS
SUPPORTS
60+ AWS SERVICES

7. Asset Management
Transform Visibility into Action
▪ Asset Dashboards – Cross-account dashboards providing
insight into enterprise-wide-inventory distribution by tags,
geography, and function
▪ Cloud-Optimized CMDB – Designed to serve as the
configuration management database for cross-account,
elastic, auto-scaling workloads
▪ Tagged Resources – sophisticated reporting across cost,
usage, compliance, and security based on AWS tagging
“…CloudCheckr has become an integral part of our
daily business. Not only do we have a birds-eye
view of our aggregate customers’ AWS usage, but
we can drill into any particular customer’s usage
and make recommendations around cost-
optimisation and better utilisation of their
resources. The Best Practices feature of
CloudCheckr also allows us to proactively help us
keep our customers secure, reliable, performant,
and always cost-optimised.”
Gerry Miller
CTO

8. Resource Utilization
Justin Lipton
CTO
“CloudCheckr has been fantastic in
making sure that our development and
production resources on AWS are
optimized. It’s helped us enforce our
business rules on spinning up
development instances and right size our
production instances.”
Resource usage can be identified and scaled effectively,
allowing costs to be measured, minimized, and allocated.
CloudCheckr provide summary and detailed usage statistics for resources across AWS.
Users gain actionable intelligence for all services.
Eliminate Waste
Right-sizing
Intelligent evaluations of compute resource types and
sizes to ensure appropriate allocation

9. Self-Healing Automation
CloudCheckr Automate allows users to Save Time, Money and Effort –
Empowering Innovation, Improving Agility and Building a Competitive Advantage
400+ checks to assure
a known, good state
across the cloud
Continuously monitor
for changes & events
that create risk & costs
Proactively fix, stop,
start and clean-up
the environment
Prioritise issues
programmatically
and enforce policies

10. Cost & Expense Management
Situation
• Thin margins
• Lost opportunities to capture
reserved usage revenue
• End user provisioning
• Billing & invoicing process
Complication
• Lack of visibility
• Hybrid cloud environments
• Increased need for
accountability
RIGHT MIX OF MONITORING
AND AUTOMATION
AMI
Self- Hosted
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MARGIN ENHANCEMENT BILLING & INVOICING
200%+INCREASE IN RESALE
MARGINS
$1B+MONITORED ANNUAL
CLOUD SPEND
• Customizable interface
• Up-to-Date Cost Reporting
• Budget Alerts
• Custom Charges
• Credit Assignment
• Reserved Instance
Toolkit
• Group Accounts Logically
• Automated Invoicing
• Profit Analysis
Erik Carlin
VP of Product and Engineering
“CloudCheckr offers a market leading platform in the cloud
management space and integrating the CloudCheckr
tooling into our Fanatical Support for AWS offer enables
us to provide customers and Rackspace engineers and
architects with powerful capabilities to optimize spend and
mitigate risk in the cloud.”
SaaS

11. Margin Enhancement
Custom Charges
Add custom charges, discounts & usage rates to manage your bill the way you run your
business
Credit Assignment
Retain full control over the assignment of credits to customers
Reserved Instance Toolkit
Manage multiple RI purchasing strategies by sharing/unsharing RIs across accounts in a
consolidated bill, or amortising RI costs to the customer.

12. Billing & Invoicing
Group Accounts Logically
Organize accounts into families for billing purposes to make custom charges, credit
assignment, and invoicing easy
Automated Invoicing Create, schedule, print, and email custom invoices based on
individual customer usage to streamline business operations
Profit Analysis
Analyse differences between blended and list costs to identify margin drivers and
opportunities for additional growth

13. Customer Experience
Customizable interface
Modify the appearance of the platform through whitelabeling and limit reporting access through
our granular end-user permissions
Up-to-Date Cost Reporting Continuous visibility into spend for end users through
dashboards and pre-built or custom reporting
Budget Alerts
Sophisticated forecasts and alerts to track budgets, measure burn downs, and detect
deviations in costs

14. Day 1 Solutions – Simplified Custom Billing
he Blob has always struck me as the ultimate movie
monster: an insatiably hungry, amoeba-like mass
PROFILE
SOLUTIONCHALLENGESRESULTS
Day1 Solutions is an emerging industry leader representing the new “Cloud Solutions
Provider” model. Our vision of how cloud will shape future IT business is why people seek us
out versus our competitors. From cloud consulting and implementation to ongoing managed
services, Day1 offers a full scope of services and solutions.
Continuous cost management and security
governance across IT, Security & Finance
stakeholders is managed using the CloudCheckr
platform.
Using CloudCheckr, Day1 could provide the customer with the special
Amazon Workspace pricing. This was done by using the Custom Usage
Rates feature of which is part of our AWS Partner Tools. Using Custom
Usage Rates, we allow you to override the usage rate set by Amazon. By
selecting a specific usage type, we could apply the special pricing without
having any other implications on how Day1 was billing the customer.
Needed to provide one of their customers with special Amazon Workspace
pricing and the special pricing needed to apply to only Performance Bring
Your Own License (BYOL) Workspaces running in US East. The special
pricing was two-fold, an adjustment in the price per workspace per month and
an adjustment in the price per hour per workspace. Using another tool to
achieve this, Day1 experienced inaccurate workspace billing.

15. Harvard – Achieve & Maintain HIPAA Compliance
he Blob has always struck me as the ultimate movie
monster: an insatiably hungry, amoeba-like mass
PROFILE
SOLUTIONCHALLENGESRESULTS
Harvard Medical School leverages the AWS cloud to drive the important work they do,
developing a big data lake of confidential patient data from multiple hospitals across the
United States to make biomedical discoveries and find potential new treatments for
patients.
Cloud security, configuration and change monitoring
coupled with cost & expense management with the
CloudCheckr platform.
CloudCheckr showed immediate value, helped
us achieve & maintain HIPAA compliance,
given us key recommendations around
managing expenses and is a critical part of
ensuring grant requirements are met.
Harvard needed to ensure high availability, scalability,
and HIPAA compliance across a broad range of
services and applications in the public cloud.
“We chose CloudCheckr for its
ease of use. When compared
against other tools, it was
quickly clear that CloudCheckr
would provide us more
actionable insights and
automated reporting options
than any other cloud
management platform.”

16. Thank you!