managed cloud Archives

Managed Cloud Services: Optimize, Reduce Costs, and Efficiently Achieve your Business Goals

Cloud adoption is becoming more popular across all industries, as it has proven to be reliable, efficient, and more secure as a software service. As cloud adoption increases, companies are faced with the issue of managing these new environments and their operations, ultimately impacting day-to-day business operations. Not only are IT professionals faced with the challenge of juggling their everyday work activities with managing their company’s cloud platforms but must do so in an timely, cost-efficient manner. Often, this requires hiring and training additional IT people—resources that are getting more and more difficult to find.

This is where a managed cloud service provider, like 2nd Watch, comes in.

What is a Managed Cloud Service Provider?

Managing your cloud operations on your own can seem like a daunting, tedious task that distracts from strategic business goals. A cloud managed service provider (MSP) monitors and maintains your cloud environments relieving IT from the day-to-day cloud operations, ensuring your business operates efficiently. This is not to say IT professionals are incapable of performing these responsibilities, but rather, outsourcing allows the IT professionals within your company to concentrate on the strategic operations of the business. In other words, you do what you do best, and the service provider takes care of the rest.

The alternative to an MSP is hiring and developing within your company the expertise necessary to keep up with the rapidly evolving cloud environment and cloud native technologies. Doing it yourself factors in a hiring process, training, and payroll costs.

While possible, maintaining your cloud environments internally might not be the most feasible option in the long run. Additionally, a private cloud environment can be costly and requires your applications are handled internally. Migrating to the public cloud or adopting hybrid cloud model allows companies flexibility, as they allow a service provider either partial or full control of their network infrastructure.

What are Managed Cloud Services?

Managed cloud services are the IT functions you give your service provider to handle, while still allowing you to handle the functions you want. Some examples of the management that service providers offer include:

Managed cloud database: A managed database puts some of your company’s most valuable assets and information into the hands of a complete team of experienced Database Administrators (DBAs). DBAs are available 24/7/365 to perform tasks such as database health monitoring, database user management, capacity planning and management, etc.
Managed cloud security services: The public cloud has many benefits, but with it also comes security risks. Security management is another important MSP service to consider for your business. A cloud managed service provider can prevent and detect security threats before they occur, while fully optimizing the benefits provided by a cloud environment.
Managed cloud optimization: The cloud can be costly, but only as costly as you allow it to be. An MSP can optimize cloud spend through consulting, implementation, tools, reporting services, and remediation.
Managed governance & compliance: Without proper governance, your organization can be exposed to security vulnerabilities. Should a disaster occur within your business, such as a cyberattack on a data center, MSPs offer disaster recovery services to minimize recovery downtime and data loss. A managed governance and compliance service with 2nd Watch helps your Chief Security and Compliance Officers maintain visibility and control over your public cloud environment to help achieve on-going, continuous compliance.

At 2nd Watch, our foundational services include a fully managed cloud environment with 24/7/365 support and industry leading SLAs. Our foundational services address the key needs to better manage spend, utilization, and operations.

What are the Benefits of a Cloud Managed Service Provider?

Using a Cloud Managed Service Provider comes with many benefits if you choose the right one.

Some of these benefits include, but are not limited to:

Cost savings: MSPs have experts that know how to efficiently utilize the cloud, so you get the most out of your resources while reducing cloud computing costs.
Increased data security: MSPs ensure proper safeguards are utilized while proactively monitoring and preventing potential threats to your security.
Increased employee production: With less time spent managing the cloud, your IT managers can focus on the strategic business operations.
24/7/365 management: Not only do MSPs take care of cloud management for you but do so 100% of the time.
Overall business improvement: When your cloud infrastructure is managed by a trusted cloud advisor, they can optimize your environments while simultaneously allowing time for you to focus on core business operations. They can also recommend cloud native solutions to further support the business agility required to compete.

Why Our Cloud Management Platform?

With cloud adoption increasing in popularity, choosing a managed cloud service provider to help with this process can be overwhelming. While there are many options, choosing one you can trust is important to the success of your business. 2nd Watch provides multi-cloud management across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and has a special emphasis of putting our customers before the cloud. Additionally, we use industry standard, cloud native tooling to prevent platform lock in.

The solutions we create at 2nd Watch are tailored to your business needs, creating a large and lasting impact on our clients. For example:

On average, 2nd Watch saves customers 41% more than if they managed the cloud themselves (based on customer data)
Customers experience increased efficiency in launching applications, adding an average 240 hours of productivity per year for your business
On average, we save customers 21% more than our competitors

Next Steps

2nd Watch helps customers at every step in their cloud journey, whether that’s cloud adoption or optimizing your current cloud environment to reduce costs. We can effectively manage your cloud, so you don’t have to. Contact us to get the most out of your cloud environment with a managed cloud service provider you can trust.

-Tessa Foley, Marketing

Managed Cloud Security Services and Why you Should Invest in Them

Cloud adoption throughout all industries has become incredibly pervasive in recent years. With cloud management as a relatively newer concept, business organizations may struggle to understand each aspect that is required to effectively run a cloud environment. One aspect that should be involved at every layer of the cloud is security, yet many organizations fail to implement a strong security system in their cloud until an attack happens and it is too late.

A cloud environment and the controls necessary to orchestrate a robust security and governance platform is not the same as your traditional on-premises environment.

The State of Cloud Security Today

As beneficial as the public cloud is for companies globally today, lack of security in the cloud can be a major issue. A report from Sophos indicated that iMost of these attacks are simply from misconfigurations of these organizations’ cloud security. Thus, the attacks can be prevented if configured and managed properly. Orca Security’s 2020 State of Public Cloud Security Report revealed that 80.7% of organizations have at least one neglected, internet-facing workload – meaning the OS is unsupported or unpatched. Attackers can use one small vulnerability as leverage to move across an organization, which is how most data breaches occur.

Managed cloud security services help lay a strong foundation for security in the cloud that is automated and continuous with 24/7 management. With constant management, threats and attacks are detected before they occur, and your business avoids the repercussions that come with security misconfigurations.

What are managed cloud security services?

Managed cloud security services provide security configurations, automation, 24/7 management, and reporting from an external cloud security provider. If an attack should occur, the result is downtime and the loss of money and data. Additionally, the lack of a well-rounded security system can lead to regulatory compliance challenges.

Monitoring and maintaining strong security requires continuous attention to be effective. Employing a managed security service gives businesses the protection they need while simultaneously providing IT departments with additional time to focus on other business concerns. Redirecting cybersecurity efforts to an external provider not only provides IT departments with flexibility, but also reduces costs compared to handling cybersecurity in house. Managing cybersecurity independently creates costs such as staffing, software licensing, hardware, implementation costs, and management costs. All the costs and management required for effective security can be overwhelming and managed security services takes the weight of maintaining the security of your data off your shoulders.

What are the benefits of using cloud security services?

Implementing strong cloud security may seem like an obvious choice for a business to make, but many businesses may not want to devote the time, resources, or money to building and maintaining a strong cybersecurity system. Investing your resources into cloud security is imperative for your business and pays off in the long run.

Five different benefits resulting from a strong cloud security system include:

Automation: Once your configurations have been set up, there is reduced reliance on human intervention. This minimizes time spent managing security while also reducing the risk for error.
Efficiency: Cloud services improve the security of your data and maintain regulatory compliance through timely patching and automated updates with less downtime.
Safety: Data is well-protected with cloud security due to 24/7 monitoring and real-time threat detection.
Proactive Defense: Threats are identified quickly and treated proactively in the cloud should an incident occur.
Cost-effective: The cloud requires a unique approach to security. While managed cloud security services can seem costly upfront, they prove to be worthwhile in the long run by utilizing expertise that may not be available in-house. Additionally, cloud security services will ensure the safety of your workloads and data, and prevent the costs associated with a data breach.

2nd Watch Managed Cloud Security

At 2nd Watch, we understand cloud security is important at every step of your cloud journey. 2nd Watch has a dedicated Managed Security Team that monitors your cloud environments 24/7/365, remediating vulnerabilities quickly. Rather than putting security on the backburner, we believe security is a pillar of business, and building it into the foundation of a company is important to meet evolving compliance needs in a cost-effective manner.

Companies just getting started in the cloud can rely on 2nd Watch to get security right for them the first time. Even for companies already established in the cloud, we can take an in-depth look at security and compliance maturity, existing capabilities, and growth trajectory to provide a prescriptive security roadmap. No matter where you are in your cloud journey, we ensure your security is well-integrated into your cloud environments.

At 2nd Watch we are with you from beginning to end, monitoring your security even after implementation. At a glance, our end-to-end services include:

Security Review: Ensures the proper safeguards are utilized for your multi-cloud environments with a single point of contact for your security needs. Our security assessment and remediation offering can reveal how your cloud security posture stacks up to industry standards such as CIS, GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, NIST, PCI DSS, and SOC 2.
Environment Monitoring: 24/7/365 multi-cloud monitoring protects against the most recent vulnerabilities.
Threat Analysis: Managed Reliability Operations Center (ROC) proactively analyzes and remediates potential threats.
Issue Resolution: Identified issues are quickly resolved providing enterprise class and proactive defense.

Fully-Managed DevOps – Is It Possible?

If you’re in a development or operations role, you probably gawked at this title. The truth is, having some other company manage your “DevOps” is an insult to the term. However, bear with me while I put out this scenario:

What if you don’t have a team that can manage all your tools that enable you to adopt DevOps methods?
Why should you have to spend time managing the tools you use, instead of developing and operating your application?
What if your team isn’t ready for this big cultural, process, and tooling change or disagrees on where to begin?

These are key reasons to consider adopting a DevOps platform managed by experts.

Just a Quick Definition:

To bring you along my thought process, let’s first agree on what DevOps IS. DevOps, a term built by combining the words Development and Operations, is a set of cultural values and organizational practices implemented with the intent to improve business outcomes. DevOps methods were initially formed to bridge the gap between Development and Operations so that teams could increase speed to delivery as well as quality of product at the same time. The focus of DevOps is to increase collaboration and feedback between Business Stakeholders, Development, QA, IT or Cloud Operations, and Security to build better products or services.

When companies attempt to adopt DevOps practices, they often think of tooling first. However, a true DevOps transformation includes an evolution of your company culture, processes, collaboration, measurement systems, organizational structure, and automation and tooling — in short, things that cannot be accomplished through automation alone.

Why DevOps?
Adopting DevOps practices can be a gamechanger in your business if implemented correctly. Some of the benefits include:

Increase Operational Efficiencies – Simplify the software development toolchain and minimize re-work to reduce total cost of ownership.
Deliver Better Products Faster – Accelerate the software delivery process to quickly deliver value to your customers.
Reduce Security and Compliance Risk – Simplify processes to comply with internal controls and industry regulations without compromising speed.
Improve Product Quality, Reliability, and Performance – Limit context switching, reduce failures, and decrease MTTR while improving customer experience.

The basic goal here is to create and enable a culture of continuous improvement.

DevOps Is Not All Sunshine and Roses:

Despite the promise of DevOps, teams still struggle due to conflicting priorities and opposing goals, lackluster measurement systems, lack of communication or collaborative culture, technology sprawl creating unreliable systems, skill shortage, security bottlenecks, rework slowing progress…you get the picture. Even after attempting to solve these problems, many large enterprises face setbacks including:

Reliability: Their existing DevOps Toolchain is brittle, complex, and expensive to maintain.
Speed: Developers are slowed down by bottlenecks, hand-offs, and re-work.
Security: Security is slowing down their release cycle, but they still need to make sure they scan the code for licensing and vulnerabilities issues before it goes out.
Complexity: DevOps is complex and an ongoing process. They don’t currently have the internal skillset to start or continue their progress.
Enterprise Ready: SaaS DevOps offerings do not enable them to have privacy or features they require for enterprise security and management.

Enter Managed DevOps:

Managed DevOps removes much of this complexity by providing you with a proven framework for success beginning with an assessment that sets the go-forward strategy, working on team upskilling, implementing end-to-end tooling, and then finally providing ongoing management and coaching.

If you have these symptoms, Managed DevOps is the cure:

Non-Existent or Brittle Pipeline
Tools are a Time Suck; No time to focus on application features
You know change is necessary, but your team disagrees on where to begin

Because Managed DevOps helps bring your teams along the change curve by providing the key upskilling and support, plus a proven tool-chain, you can kick off immediately without spending months debating tooling or process.

If you’re ready to remove the painful complexity and start to build, test, and deploy applications in the cloud in a continuous and automated way, talk with our DevOps experts about implementing a Managed DevOps solution.

-Stefana Muller, Sr Product Manager

2nd Watch Enterprise Cloud Expertise On Display at AWS re:Invent 2017

AWS re:Invent is less than twenty days away and 2nd Watch is proud to be a 2017 Platinum Sponsor for the sixth consecutive year. As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network Premier Consulting Partner, we look forward to attending and demonstrating the strength of our cloud design, migration, and managed services offerings for enterprise organizations at AWS re:Invent 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

About AWS re:Invent

Designed for AWS customers, enthusiasts and even cloud computing newcomers, the nearly week-long conference is a great source of information and education for attendees of all skill levels. AWS re:Invent is THE place to connect, engage, and discuss current AWS products and services via breakout sessions ranging from introductory and advanced to expert as well as to hear the latest news and announcements from key AWS executives, partners, and customers. This year’s agenda offers a full additional day of content for even more learning opportunities, more than 1,000 breakout sessions, an expanded campus, hackathons, boot camps, hands-on labs, workshops, expanded Expo hours, and the always popular Amazonian events featuring broomball, Tatonka Challenge, fitness activities, and the attendee welcome party known as re:Play.

2nd Watch at re:Invent 2017

2nd Watch has been a Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) since 2012 and was recently named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide (March 2017). We hold AWS Competencies in Financial Services, Migration, DevOps, Marketing, and Commerce, Life Sciences and Microsoft Workloads, and have recently completed the AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner Program Audit for the third year in a row. Over the past decade, 2nd Watch has migrated and managed AWS deployments for companies such as Crate & Barrel, Condé Nast, Lenovo, Motorola, and Yamaha.

The 2nd Watch breakout session—Continuous Compliance on AWS at Scale—will be led by cloud security experts Peter Meister and Lars Cromley. The session will focus on the need for continuous security and compliance in cloud migrations, and attendees will learn how a managed cloud provider can use automation and cloud expertise to successfully control these issues at scale in a constantly changing cloud environment. Registered re:Invent Full Conference Pass holders can add the session to their agendas here.

In addition to our breakout session, 2nd Watch will be showcasing our customers’ successes in the Expo Hall located in the Sands Convention Center (between The Venetian and The Palazzo hotels). We invite you to stop by booth #1104 where you can explore 2nd Watch’s Managed Cloud Solutions, pick up a coveted 2nd Watch t-shirt and find out how you can win one of our daily contest giveaways—a totally custom 2nd Watch skateboard!

Want to make sure you get time with one of 2nd Watch’s Cloud Journey Masters while at re:Invent? Plan ahead and schedule a meeting with one of 2nd Watch’s AWS Professional Certified Architects, DevOps, or Engineers. Last but not least, 2nd Watch will be hosting its annual re:Invent after party on Wednesday, November 29. If you haven’t RSVP’d for THE AWS re:Invent Partner Party, click here to request your invitation (Event has passed)

AWS re:Invent is sure to be a week full of great technical learning, networking, and social opportunities. We know you will have a packed schedule but look forward to seeing you there! Be on the lookout for my list of “What to Avoid at re:Invent 2017” in the coming days…it’s sure to help you plan for your trip and get the most out of your AWS re:Invent experience.

–Katie Laas-Ellis, Marketing Manager, 2nd Watch

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About 2nd Watch

2nd Watch is an AWS Premier tier Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) providing managed cloud to enterprises. The company’s subject matter experts, software-enabled services and cutting-edge solutions provide companies with tested, proven, and trusted solutions, allowing them to fully leverage the power of the cloud. 2nd Watch solutions are high performing, robust, increase operational excellence, decrease time to market, accelerate growth and lower risk. Its patent-pending, proprietary tools automate everyday workload management processes for big data analytics, digital marketing, line-of-business and cloud native workloads. 2nd Watch is a new breed of business which helps enterprises design, deploy and manage cloud solutions and monitors business critical workloads 24×7. 2nd Watch has more than 400 enterprise workloads under its management and more than 200,000 instances in its managed public cloud. The venture-backed company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. To learn more about 2nd Watch, visit www.2ndwatch.com or call 888-317-7920.

How to Choose the Right Hyperscale Managed Service Provider (MSP)

One of the challenges that many businesses struggle to overcome is how to keep up with the massive (and on-going) changes in technology and implement best practices for managing them. The Public Cloud—in particular, Hyperscale Cloud providers like AWS—has ushered in a new era of IT technology. This technology changes rapidly and is designed to provide businesses with the building blocks that allow IT organizations to focus on innovation and growth, rather than mess with things that don’t differentiate their business.

A Hyperscale Managed Services Provider (MSP) can help address a very important gap for many businesses that struggle to:

Keep up with the frenetic pace of change in Public Cloud
Define and use best practices to achieve superior results
Manage their infrastructure the most efficient way possible

In most cases, Hyperscale MSPs have deep expertise, technology, and automated capabilities to deliver high-quality managed service on a hyperscale platform. And because Hyperscale MSPs are solely focused to deliver capabilities on the cloud IaaS and PaaS that today’s enterprises are using, they are well versed in the best practices and standards to achieve the right results for their clients.

So, how do you go about selecting the right MSP? The answer to this question is critical because we believe choosing the right MSP is one of the most important decisions you will make when consuming the public cloud. It is also important to note that some of the qualifications to look for when selecting a Hyperscale MSP for your business needs are obvious, while others are more elusive. I’ve included a few suggestions below to keep in mind when evaluating and selecting the right Hyperscale MSP.

Expertise on the Platform of Your Choice

First and foremost, no two public cloud providers are the same. Each provider implements MSP strategies differently—from infrastructure and redundancy, to automation and billing concepts. Secondly, it isn’t enough for a provider to tell you they have a few applications running on the platform. When looking to entrust someone with your most valuable assets, expertise is key! An important KPI for measuring the capabilities of a MSP that many businesses overlook is the provider’s depth and breadth of experience. A qualified Hyperscale MSP will have the right certifications, accreditations, and certified engineer-to-customer ratios. You may feel good about signing with a large provider because they claim a higher number of certified engineers than the smaller firms, until…you realize their certified engineer-to-customer ratio is out of whack. Having 200 certified engineers means nothing if you have 5,000+ customers. At 2nd Watch, we have more certified engineers than we do customers, and we like it that way.

The Focus is on Customer Value

This is an obvious recommendation, but it does have some nuances. Many MSPs will simply take the “Your mess for less” approach to managing your infrastructure. Our customers tell us that one of the reasons they chose 2nd Watch was our focus on the things that matter to them. There are many MSPs that have technical capabilities to manage Cloud infrastructure but not all are able to focus in on how an enterprise wants to use the Public Cloud. MSPs with the ability to understand their client’s needs and goals tailor their approach to work for the enterprise vs. making them snap to some preconceived notion of how these things should work or function. Find an MSP that is willing to make the Public Cloud work the way you want it to and your overall experience, and the outcome, will be game changing.

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize

Moving to the Public Cloud is just the first step in the journey to realizing business value and transforming IT. The Cloud is dynamic in nature, and due to that fact, it is important that you don’t rest on just a migration once you are using it. New instance types, new services, or just optimizing what you are running today are great ways to ensure your infrastructure is running at top notch. It is important to make sure your MSP has a strong, ongoing story about optimization and how they will provide it. At 2nd Watch, we break optimization into 3 categories: Financial Optimization, Technical Optimization and Operations Optimization. It is a good idea to ask your MSP how they handle these three facets of optimization and at what cadence. Keep in mind that some providers’ pricing structures can act as a disincentive for optimization. For example, if your MSP’s billing structure is based on a percentage of your total cloud spend, and they reduce that bill by 30% through optimization efforts, that means they are now getting paid less, proportionately, and are likely not motivated to do this type of optimization on a regular basis as it hurts their revenue. Alternatively, we have also seen MSPs charge extra for these types of services, so the key is to make sure you ask if it’s included and get details about the services that would be considered an extra charge.

Full Service

The final qualification to look for in a Hyperscale MSP is whether they are a full-service provider. Too often, pure play MSPs are not able to provide a full service offering under their umbrella. The most common reason is that they lack professional services to assess and migrate workloads or cloud architects to build out new functionality.

Our enterprise clients tell us that one of their major frustrations is having to work with multiple vendors on a project. With multiple vendors, it is difficult to keep track of who is accountable and for what they are accountable. Why would the vendor that is migrating be motivated to make sure the application is optimized for support if they aren’t providing the support? I have heard horror stories of businesses trying to move to the cloud and becoming frustrated that multiple vendors are involved on the same workload, because the vendors blame each other for missing deadlines or not delivering key milestones or technical content. Your business will be better served by hiring an MSP who can run the full cloud-migration process—from workload assessment and migration to managing and optimizing your cloud infrastructure on an ongoing basis.

In addition to the tips I have listed above, 2nd Watch recommends utilizing Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to help evaluate the various public cloud managed service providers available to you. Gartner positioned 2nd Watch in the Leaders quadrant of the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide for our completeness of vision and ability to execute. You can download and read the full report here.

-Kris Bliesner, CTO

Why Buy Amazon Web Services Through a Partner?

As an AWS Premier Partner and audited, authorized APN Managed Service Provider (MSP), 2nd Watch offers comprehensive services to help customers accelerate their journey to the cloud. For many of our customer we not only provide robust Managed Cloud Services, we also resell Amazon products and services.

What are the advantages for customers who purchase from a value-added AWS reseller? Why would a customer do this? With an AWS reseller, who owns the account? These are all great questions and the subject of today’s blog post.

I am going to take these questions in reverse order and deal with the ownership issue first, as it is the most commonly misconstrued part of the arrangement. Let me be clear – when 2nd Watch resells Amazon Web Services as an AWS reseller, our customer “owns” the account. At 2nd Watch we work hard every day to earn our customers’ trust and confidence and thereby, their business.

Our pricing model for Managed Cloud Services is designed to leverage the advantages of cloud computing’s consumption model – pay for what you use. 2nd Watch customers who purchase AWS through us have the right to move their account to another MSP or purchase direct from AWS if they are unhappy with our services.

Who “Owns” the AWS Account

I put the word “own” in quotes above because I think it is worth digressing for a minute on how different audiences interpret that word. Some people see the ownership issue as a vendor lock-in issue, some as an intellectual property concern and still others a liability and security requirement. For all of these reasons it is important we are specific and precise with our language.

With 2nd Watch’s Managed Cloud Services consumption model you are not locked-in to 2nd Watch as your AWS reseller or MSP. AWS Accounts and usage purchased through us belong to the customer, not 2nd Watch, and therefore any intellectual property contained therein is the responsibility and property of the customer. Additionally, as the account owner, a customer’s AWS accounts use a shared responsibility model. With regards to liability and security, however, our role as an MSP can be a major benefit.

Often MSP’s “govern or manage” the IAM credentials for an AWS account to ensure consistency, security and governance. I use the words govern or manage and not “own” as I want to be clear that the customer still has the right to take back the credentials and overall responsibility for managing each account, which is the opposite of lock-in. So why would a customer want their MSP to manage their credentials? The reason is pretty simple; similar to a managed data center or colocation facility, you own the infrastructure, but you hire experts to manage the day-to-day management for increased limits of liability, security and enhanced SLA’s.

Simply put, if you, as a customer, want your MSP to carry the responsibility for your AWS account and provide service level agreements (complete with financial repercussions), you are going to want to make sure administrative access to the environment is limited with regards to who can make changes that may impact stability or performance. As a 2nd Watch Managed Cloud Services customer, allowing us to manage IAM credentials also comes with the benefit of our secure SOC 2 Type 2 (audited) compliant systems and processes. Often our security controls exceed the capabilities of our customers.

Also worth noting – as we on-board a Managed Cloud Services customer, we often will audit their environment and provide best practice recommendations. These recommendations are aligned with the excellent AWS Well Architected framework and help customers achieve greater stability, performance, security and cost optimization. Our customers have the option of completing the remediation or having 2nd Watch perform the remediation. Implementing best practices for managing user access along with leveraging cutting edge technology results in a streamlined journey to the cloud.

Benefits of Buying AWS Through 2nd Watch

So now we have addressed the question of who owns the account, but we haven’t addressed why a customer would want to procure AWS through a partner. First, see my earlier blog post regarding Cloud Cost Complexity for some background. Second, buying AWS through 2nd Watch as an AWS partner, or AWS reseller, comes with several immediate advantages:

All services are provided at AWS market rates or better.
Pass through all AWS volume tier discounts and pricing
Pass through AWS Enterprise Agreement terms, if one exists
Solution based and enhanced SLA’s (above and beyond what AWS provides) shaped around your business requirements
Familiarity with your account – our (2) U.S. based NOC’s are staffed 24x7x365 and have access to a comprehensive history of your account and governance policies.
Access to Enterprise class support including 2nd Watch’s multiple dedicated AWS Technical Account Managers with Managed Cloud Services agreements
Consolidate usage across many AWS accounts (see AWS volume discount tiers above)
Consolidated billing for both Managed Cloud Services and AWS Capacity
Access to our Cloud Management Platform, a web-based console, greatly simplifies the management and analysis of AWS usage
- Ability to support complex show-back or charge-back bills for different business units or departments as well as enterprise-wide roll-ups for a global view
- Ability to allocate Volume and Reserved Instance discounts to business units per your requirements
- Set budgets with alerts, trend analysis, tag reporting, etc.
Ability to provide Reserved Instance recommendations and management services
- Helps improve utilization and prevent spoilage
You can select the level of services for Managed Cloud Services on any or all accounts – you can consolidate your purchasing without requiring services you don’t need.
Assistance with AWS Account provisioning and governance – we adhere to your corporate standards (and make pro-active recommendations).

In short, buying your AWS capacity through 2nd Watch as your MSP is an excellent value that will help you accelerate your cloud adoption. We provide the best of AWS with our own services layered on top to enhance the overall offering. Please contact us for more information about our Managed Cloud Services including Managed AWS Capacity, and 2nd Watch as an AWS Reseller Partner.

Marc Kagan, Director, Account Management

Managing the Unexpected Complexity of the Cloud

When people first hear about the cloud, they typically envision some nebulous server in the sky. Moving apps to the cloud should be a piece of cake, they think. Simply pick them up, stick them in the cloud, and you’re done.

Reality, of course, is quite different. True, for simple, monolithic applications, you could provision a single cloud instance and simply port the code over.

The problem is, today’s applications are far from simple and rarely monolithic. Even a simple web app has multiple pieces, ranging from front-end web server code interacting with application code on the middle tier, which in turn talks to the database underneath.

However, in the enterprise context, even these multi-tier web apps are more the exception than the rule. Older enterprise applications like ERP run on multiple servers, leveraging various data sources and user interfaces, communicating via some type of middleware.

Migrating such an application to the cloud is a multifaceted, complex task that goes well beyond picking it up and putting it in the cloud. In practice, some components typically remain on premise while others may move to the cloud, creating a hybrid cloud scenario.

Furthermore, quite often developers must rewrite those elements that move to the cloud in order to leverage its advantages. After all, the cloud promises to provide horizontal scalability, elasticity, and automated recovery from failure, among other benefits. It’s essential to architect and build applications appropriately to take advantage of these characteristics.

However, not all enterprise cloud challenges necessarily involve migrating older applications to cloud environments. For many organizations, digital transformation is the driving force, as customer preferences and behavior drive their technology decisions – and thus digital often begins with the customer interface.

When digital is the priority, enterprises cannot simply build a web site and call it a day, as they may have done in the 1990s. Even adding mobile interfaces doesn’t address customer digital demands. Instead, digital represents an end-to-end rethink of what it means to put an application into the hands of customers.

Today’s modern digital application typically includes multiple third-party applications, from the widgets, plugins, and tags that all modern enterprise web pages include, to the diversity of third-party SaaS cloud apps that support the fabric of modern IT.

With this dynamic complexity of today’s applications, the boundaries of the cloud itself are becoming unclear. Code may change at any time. And there is no central, automated command and control that encompasses the full breadth of such applications.

Instead, management of modern cloud-based, digital applications involves a never-ending, adaptive approach to management that maintains the performance and security of these complex enterprise applications.

Without such proactive, adaptive management, the customer experience will suffer – and with it the bottom line. Furthermore, security and compliance breaches become increasingly likely as the complexity of these applications grows.

It’s easy to spot the irony here. The cloud promised greater automation of the operational environment, and with increased automation we expected simpler management. But instead, complexity exploded, thus leading to the need for more sophisticated, adaptive management. But in the end, we’re able to deliver greater customer value – as long as we properly manage today’s end-to-end, cloud-centric digital applications.

-Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx