CloudCheckr
Independent Multi-Cloud Management, Security, and Compliance

Cost efficient, pay-as-you-go models and enhanced security are amongst the major factors that propel enterprises to adopt cloud platforms. In today’s digital era, organizations resort to a number of IaaS solutions those result in multi-cloud environments. However, complex billing structures, higher cost, lack of visibility, and security vulnerabilities can make the task of managing multiple platforms an exercise in frustration. This is where CloudCheckr, cloud management increases an enterprise’s return on investment in the public cloud.

Alongside enterprises, service providers also face several constraints due to their customers’ reliance upon diverse cloud platforms. Customers have several questions regarding the cost, security, and compliance, and if those aren’t answered satisfactorily, they won’t feel confident enough to increase their public cloud usage. CloudCheckr keenly focuses on cost-optimization through cost allocation, expense management, and scheduling of invoices and dives deeper into the security aspect by automatically identifying and alerting administrators about misconfigurations. When it comes to adhering to federal standards, CloudCheckr’s innovative solution keeps up with more than 35 different regulations including HIPAA and NIST and can automatically identify issues that may violate these standards. A CloudCheckr dashboard enables monitoring of cloud environments and can visualize and summarize the cost of operations. Jeff Valentine, Chief Product Officer at CloudCheckr, says, “As a large enterprise or service provider you might need to ingest terabytes of billing data. We price it and allocate it to the right place, and then send out invoices again for showback or chargeback, if you are an enterprise, and for profit, if you are a service provider.”

Interestingly, CloudCheckr does not require any complicated installations; instead, it can access customers’ cloud usage metadata through API-based permissions. For example, a Microsoft Azure customer can go to the Azure portal and can grant the necessary permissions for CloudCheckr to read the account metadata. Valentine says, “We know whether or not some folders are public or how some firewall rules are configured, but we have no idea of what applications are running on which places, and we can’t read the content of the files.

Enterprises benefit from cloud management, getting easy-to-understand cost optimization recommendations and comprehensive security, freeing up their internal teams to focus on building rather than managing, and thereby accelerating their digital transformation

So, we acquire the metadata in a streamlined manner that goes over the internet through our SaaS app.”

The unique value of CloudCheckr can be best understood through one of their clients, a large financial institution. The customer was primarily using Microsoft Azure and had a little bit of Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure running. In search of centralized means to know more about their cloud usage, which could be projected across all their departments, they approached CloudCheckr who not only offered them the desired assurance and metrics regarding security and cost, but the onboarding team identified usage demands and provided them relevant training. The client was also able to reduce their operational cost to a large extent.

CloudCheckr leverages the exciting concept of NIHITO or ‘nothing important happens in the office’ to have a first-hand understanding of the market trends and challenges. As a result, customers using CloudCheckr scale faster in the cloud than those who don’t. In this context, a question arises—what does the future hold for CloudCheckr? Looking ahead, the company is evaluating cloud management for additional platforms beyond AWS and Azure, while continuing to roll-out new security enhancements and cost management features that drive value for enterprises and service providers. CloudCheckr’s growth is consistent and market-specific which positions the company ahead of its competitors.