David Cantu: 00:18 Hello, and thank you for making it to our webinar on Making a Cost-Effective Transition to the Cloud. This is David Cantu, one of Redapt's co-founders. Presenting today is going to be Chad Stanfield. While we're here, we're going to help you learn what's helping people in today's business. What's helping people transition their workloads to the cloud, really kind of sharing challenges, common challenges that our customers face, and how Redapt is making the transition to GCP as easy as possible.

Today, the presenter is Chad Stanfield - he's our director of modern data center. He leads the team that does the migration and helps people transition their workloads over to cloud. What is really unique to Chad, and what I love, is that he's on the consulting side for Redapt, but he's really been on the customer side and has done a lot of this work for the organizations he's been with. He brings an incredible amount of experience, both as a user of cloud, and then as a consultant and strategist. So, I'll turn it over to you, Chad.

Chad Stanfield: 01:41 Thanks, David. Appreciate it. Today we're going to cover a few things about transition into the cloud. We want to really start out with the Google Cloud platform and help everybody understand that it is ready for your business. It can accept the applications and it's ready to bring your organization into the cloud, whether it's small, medium-size, or enterprise-size. It is available for scale and has all the features and capabilities that are needed there. It really addresses the challenges that businesses face, some of the perceived challenges that might be there, and how to overcome those. As well as how to control the operational and IT costs of leveraging the public cloud and setting up, perhaps even in a hybrid environment, while taking advantage of your traditional on-prem data center and leveraging what the cloud has to offer to get the best benefit out of that.

We'll also talk about the methodology in which you can migrate into the cloud, the benefits of partnering with a managed services program, and the rapid kind of business innovation that can bring this transition for you, as well as solving problems together. As you adapt into the new platform of the public cloud and understand what its capabilities are, and how those capabilities integrate into your line of business and the applications that you're running today to service your customers, we'll be able to work together to solve any challenges that come up and ensure that you've got the best foundation to move forward with.

We also talk about the business cases that are there from a managed services platform to ensure that you're able to hit the ground running, if you will, when you adopted into the cloud that the learning curve is very short, then we flatten out that learning curve to ensure that you're really ready for the future of your organization. And, you can grow into and invest into the scalability to meet the needs that your business has today.

When we first talk about transitioning into the cloud - why are businesses migrating into the cloud? And it really is that the public cloud has matured, and has become a tool that can be used to help broaden the capabilities of an IT organization to meet the business needs. The ability to respond to market demands very quickly with both scale up and scale down.

You have that ability, whether it's a new product launch that you have and you need to scale up very rapidly at a low and controlled costs, or if there's something that happened recently, where you might need to scale down a little bit and conserve some costs for a period of time. The cloud allows you to be very dynamic in controlling that. Really the implementation - it's a pay-for-consumption model. So you only pay for what you use. It really removes that capital expenditure that comes with building out a new data center or building out a new infrastructure to support a product line that's there.

That ultimately increases your speed to market, so you can very quickly get into market with a new offering. You can be very flexible from an existing geographic presence. The return on investment is easy to obtain, it's easy to forecast, because it is that pay-for-consumption model. As your business grows and your revenue continues to grow, then your consumption grows with it, and it's not like you're making a large upfront cost and hoping that the business will follow that.

That's what makes it affordable and scalable to do that. Really, it comes down to - you can do a lot without a whole lot of upfront costs. You can design and build out an infrastructure that can scale globally and really do it at a minimal cost for the businesses. That's doing that. As we get into this, there are a couple of things we want to keep in mind. Perhaps these are challenges, or kind of three common challenges to public cloud adoption.

These are some of the perceived barriers to entry. The first one is really around skills, and the soft skills that the team has. You really need to understand the capabilities of your existing staff. Do you have the cloud architects, versus your on-premise architects? Are they able to make that leap into what the public cloud offers, and how you do architecting for those environments?

Really, the operations engineers. You do operate it slightly differently in the cloud than you do in an on-prem data center. There's a knowledge there that might need to be gained. Additional staff training might be needed. Some people might look at this as a burden up front, because it can distract them from their normal daily activities of keeping the business running.

You need to consider - what are the costs to moving into the cloud from, not only the cloud itself, but the soft costs: the hiring, the training, the needed soft skills? It's important to notice, when you work with a partner, a lot of these soft skill costs become irrelevant and they go away, because you're leveraging the skills of that partner. That partner will work with you to ensure that your team has the capabilities they need and the knowledge they need to move forward, whether you're doing something new with DevOps type of relationship, or you're optimizing some SQL, and you might not have a really strong DBA on staff. Or, whether you're moving into containers and you might not fully understand how Kubernetes integrates, and things like that. Your cloud partner will work with you and ensure that you have those capabilities.

When you're adopting the public cloud, proper architecture is really the key to a solid cloud deployment. The governance, security, and architecture go hand-in-hand, making sure that you have the appropriate foundation, regardless of what size your initial cloud footprint is going to look like. You want to make sure that you can scale, that you can grow, and that you can move into different geographic regions.

A lot of times, when organizations adopt the cloud, they have an opportunity to kind of reset the environment. They can correct any issues, or perhaps some bad practices that may have been put in place, or just things that they want to tweak and optimize in the environment. When moving into the cloud, this is a great opportunity to take a chance and really review your governance, your security, your compliance requirements, and really optimize those for your new cloud environment. And, whether you're looking at FedRAMP, or PCI, HIPAA, SOX HITRUST, even GDPR. Whatever that compliance need is, you'll be able to work with your cloud partner and ensure that you have the appropriate foundation, governance, and security in place, and that the controls that are there to manage that going forward.

The next challenge we want to talk about is cost management. If you look at the down at the bottom, it says, “through 2020, 80% of organizations will overshoot their cloud IaaS budget due to a lack of cost optimization approaches.” This is a study that was done by Gartner. This is also a study, or a fact, that we see with our customers. It comes down to the failure to manage the cloud costs are attributed to the key challenges that most organizations struggle with, and it comes down to the complexity of adding a new cloud environment, as well as understanding what that reporting looks like, so you know what the costs are and how to be able to control those costs.

You might be in one cloud. You might be in an on-prem environment, plus having a cloud. You might have multiple clouds. You could have any combination of these. As you add these environments, there is another layer of information that needs to be understood and costs that need to be controlled. When working with a managed services partner, this becomes much easier. The managed services partners invest in robust reporting tools that can bring cost visibility front and center against any environment that you have, so you'll be able to not only understand your current cost, but look into the future and understand what the forecasting is going to look like for those costs, so you can really manage that environment much better.

When we look at a review of the challenges, we talk about skills, governance, and costing. These are just a few of the things we need to look at when you're moving into the cloud. Here are some questions that we should ask ourselves as we're looking at moving into the cloud: How do we respond to the business needs? What is required to support a cloud-based environment? Do we have the skill sets in the organization to do that? How do we transform and fund IT going forward?

Do we want to make that shift from capital expense to an operating expense? How do we control the impact on the business, whether it's positive or negative? Can IT move as quickly as the business needs to move to launch new products, or to enter into new markets, or new geographic regions? Can we respond appropriately to that?

As we go through here, we introduce that managed services approach. The managed services is designed to simplify this process of adopting the cloud into the environment. With Redapt managed services, we ensure that the cloud investment you're making aligns with the business vision, so you're actually using the items that you need to use, and you're using them at an appropriate level. We do this by working through monthly business reviews.

We look at consumption reporting tools. We review the forecasting of that consumption. We also deliver an effective roadmap. How quickly can you get into the cloud? And, once you're in the cloud, is it the correct foundation? Is it the correct architecture to scale and to grow? Is it really giving you what you need for your environment?

You can work with, not only certified professional engineers and architects at Redapt, but we also have technical account managers that'll continually review your environment and your business needs, and make sure that those are matching up. We also have the ability to proactively control the cloud costs. It's about maximizing that ROI. When you're moving into an operational expense, you want to make sure of what that's going to look like, and you can control that. You want that to trend with your customer growth, so it's very much trending in line and can support the needs that the business has on scaling out into the new opportunities.

Then, the support model. You want something that's flexible. Some organizations are very hands-on and they enjoy learning the new technology, and they enjoy integrating into new technology, and they really just need a helping hand to get over that first learning curve, or they want someone to just kind of monitor things 24/7 so they can relax in the evening. Then we have other customers at the other end of the spectrum that really want a full-service turnkey offering, where maybe they don't have a robust IT staff on site, and they do want someone else to manage IT, so they can focus on the business.

With Redapt, we really have designed the programs to fit into those two categories and provide, either just an overlay support, or to do white glove, full turnkey services there. Really, we want to help you overcome the cloud adoption process.

When we get to the decision, "Okay, we're going to the cloud and the business is ready to take on the cloud," how do we get there? What is this transition? How can managed services help us get there? With Redapt, managed services is built around addressing these primary challenges of cloud adoption. And, how do we simplify this approach? How do we make it easier for organizations to jump into the cloud very quickly and be able to scale and leverage what the cloud has to offer right away?

We lead this experience with the technical account manager who provides customized services. It's that personalized relationship. We're working with this together with you. We want to bring you into the cloud. We want you to feel comfortable with what's going on with your environment, feel comfortable about the technologies being used, and the capabilities that the cloud can bring. Not only today, but in the future, so you can plan accordingly and help the business plan accordingly to what they need going forward.

That dedicated technical account manager is available. They really understand your environment. They are the liaison between understanding all the programs we have to offer, as well as the cloud, and how it fits into your organization. We do monthly business reviews. These monthly business reviews are around asset management, cost reviews, making sure that you're taking advantage of what the cloud has to offer, that it is fitting in line with the existing business. We also offer what we call CIO advisory services.

This is the ability for you to request direct access into business leaders or other consultancy-type questions. Is something new coming out that you want to know more about? Is there a new technology that you heard about, but you don't quite understand how that would integrate into your business? The CIO advisory services is an excellent opportunity for you to have a deeper level discussion to understand a bit more about a technology or a roadmap item, or how to leverage something a bit more for your business, to help you become more capable in your offerings.

Certainly, we have 24/7 support at monitoring. You can open tickets via web interface, email, phone calls, all those types of things. But, we take it one step further with this proactive support. We're monitoring your environment. We're looking for issues in advance. We want to find them before the failure happens. We want to be able to get in front of those items that we see coming up, and we review those with you as part of that technical account manager experience.

Ultimately, if there is a failure, we respond to that very, very quickly. We offer several tiers of services as far as how quickly we can respond to that and resolve those issues in cases that come up. Cost is a big portion of this. The tools we've invested into really help us monitor and optimize these costs. They look for sudden spikes.

If, all of a sudden, you're trending at a cost-forecasting that makes sense and you see a giant spike in consumption for some reason, we'll get notified of that, we'll contact you, and make sure that's an appropriate spike. We want to make sure it wasn't an accident, or something got left on by mistake, or the code is doing something unexpected.

We want to catch that before that spike turns into more of a problem. We proactively monitor the environment, help you understand what's going on in that environment, and help resolve any issues that might be out of norm.

We also look at the configurations. We like to increase efficiency and reduce costs by just configurations. There's lots of things that are available within the cloud that you can leverage that might not have been available in an on-prem environment, such as load balancer, HA capability, or scale-up and scale-back capabilities that are dynamic. We really like to work with you, understand the business, and what the business needs are, so we're ensuring you have the most efficient environment built out for you.

Then really around that enablements. It's really the governance, the compliance, and the security you need. We want to help you be innovative in leveraging the cloud, so it becomes an asset to your IT staff to help the business. So you can continue moving forward with confidence in what's going on there.

As I said before, building that true partnership is working with that technical account manager. The Redapt TAM is the one person who knows all the ins and outs of the program. With the regular reviews against your cloud budgets, as well as focusing on driving accountability towards your costs and consumptions, really that single point of contact is the person that you can get in contact with about anything that's going on in your cloud environment. Whether it's something to do with an ROI, whether it's something to do with a custom report that might be needed, if you want to make sure that the assets that you have deployed are sized appropriately, whether you want a recommendation on should you refactor, or should you change one of the items that you're using in the cloud to help with performance, or to reduce costs, or anything like that.

We'll be able to really dive in and have that kind of targeted methodology where we do that monthly sync. We connect with you about everything that's going on in the environment, any questions or concerns you might have. You also have access to a wealth of knowledge. There are several experts at Redapt who can support anything, any of the new technologies in GCP. We also have a strong foundation on traditional data centers, the technology in general, and how it supports the environment moving forward.

We can really dive in, help understand the environment, and really support your IT team going forward. When it comes down to the cost savings of managed services - where does it really help? This helps because we analyze underutilized idle assets. At times, when you're on a traditional data center, you've created a capital expenditure, you've purchased an IT asset, and it's running, you don't necessarily care how utilized it is, whether it's 20% utilized, or 80% utilized. You've already sunk in the cost to purchase that.

So, you might not be monitoring that utilization as closely as you might want to. When you're into the cloud, remember it is a consumption-based model, versus that sunk-cost or capital-expenditure model. We really want to understand any underutilized assets, or anything that's not being used at all, because those are potential cost savings.

When we're monitoring that, we're looking for those underutilized and idle assets, and certainly you'll give recommendations around how to improve your costs, by either resizing or reconfiguring some assets that aren't being used to their full capabilities. That really helps us balance our price versus value, whether you're talking about a consumption or a compute asset, or whether they're talking about storage and the speed of storage - it's really balancing the availability of that item versus the cost of that item. We help you make those determinations on which direction you should go.

Whether the value is more on availability, or the value is more on decreasing costs, we can help with those configurations. We monitor and look for misconfigured items. Those might be accidents that come into play, that can consume a lot of compute resources unintentionally. Not only are we looking to ensure that best practices are followed in the environment as you build it out, but we'll also be monitoring for those spikes in any consumption anomalies we see pop up in there.

We also continue to recommend environments that we see. The cloud is continually changing. New features are becoming available very rapidly. We ensure that you're aware of these features. We ensure you have the ability to take advantage of those, if you'd like, in your environment, and we can help you implement those very quickly.

Ultimately we want to help with the distribution of your content. You might have customers on the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States, and you want to bring your application closer to those customers on both shores, or you might have a global presence where you've got Europe, AsiaPac, and Americas, and you want to distribute your workload across each of those regions to ensure a better response time. With going into the cloud, we can really help you ensure you've got the right-sized assets in each of those regions, so you are connecting with your customers.

As we go into there, we talk about migrating into the cloud. There's really several ways to migrate into the cloud. We're going to talk about three of them today. The three that we talk about are the most common that you have. The first one we'll look at is a lift and shift approach. Lift and shift approach is taking what you have in the data center today, with very little changes to it, and bringing it up into a cloud environment.

An example might be - we've got an ad company. They just don't have the time or the money to break up any legacy systems. They're working fine as they are, but they want to move into the cloud. They want to be more distributed. They want to be closer to their customers, so the response time is faster, whatever that might be. They decide to move into the cloud without any major changes to their application.

Just a couple of minor tweaks to the environment, the infrastructure, some scalability, some security tweaks. As a result, you can move that infrastructure into the cloud - you have the ability to run a peak capacity paying only for what is in use. Then you also have the ability to help the IT team focus on their daily tasks and their mission-critical applications.

Where this really fits in is a data center lease might be expiring. You might have a data center and it's time to renew that. You might be looking to get more flexibility, because of the public cloud and the geographical capabilities. It might be aging equipment. You're ready for an equipment refresh cycle and you're ready to move on to more of an operational expense model, rather than a CapEx to refresh all that equipment.

Or, you might want more geographic flexibility. You want to be able to present your application closer to your customers, wherever they might be, and have that capability. Lift and shift is oftentimes a very easy way to start adopting the cloud, and it's really a way that most organizations get their first experience into the public cloud.

The next one we'll talk about is application modernization. This is often referred to as refactoring. Organizations that refactor can modify their applications and their infrastructure. It involves a little bit more advanced processing of the re-architecture. Often it involves some recoding of the application, basically rewriting that application to take full advantage of cloud native features and really maximize those operational costs and efficiency the cloud can offer.

Most often refactoring entails changing the application a little bit, looking at its components, benefiting from cloud native features like microservices or serverless computing, and really modernizing that whole application to be cloud-ready and moving forward. In the example we have here, this is a financial software company. Tthe financial services typically have some systems that have been around for a long time. They're difficult to maintain.

It might take a long time to do any updates to them and perform any changes for their customers needs. It can be very difficult. So, they identify specific applications that could benefit from cloud native services. They go in and they're able to re-architect, recode the application, focus on leveraging cloud native capabilities, and really focus on flexibility and scalability.

Ultimately, that helps the company move into an expanded marketplace, to be way more flexible by being able to move their monolithic application to something that's more flexible - microservices that are offered. There's big query machine learning at GCP. There's Cloud Bigtable that helps with managing the data, understanding the data, moving it perhaps into new technologies, such as containers, or Google's Kubernetes engine, one of their capabilities that's very flexible. They have serverless technology, as well.

While refactoring requires a bit more time and resources upfront, it ultimately allows the application to maximize the benefits of the cloud computing, really optimizing costs and efficiencies. It's a great methodology to review your applications and get them more modernized and flexible for mobile platforms, as well as bringing them closer to your customers.

The last one we'll talk about is replatforming. Replatforming is usually the happy medium approach. It takes a bit of lift to shift. It takes a bit of the refactoring stuff, and it kind of pushes it together into something a little more optimized and something that moves a bit quicker.

So re-platforming moves assets to the cloud with a small amount of, we'll call it upversioning or taking advantage of some services offered into the cloud. For example, you might move an application up into the cloud, and, rather than moving a traditional database, you could leverage something like Cloud SQL, which is a services-based database.

It's a combination of, not only the application and code as it's running today, but then picking and choosing serving solution capabilities that are available. It might be the addition of automation and enabling for auto scaling, so you can scale up and scale down. It really only looks at changing the code when needed, but just to use the base platform services.

One example of this might be - if you want to add high availability capabilities, but you might not have load balancers and the other items needed on your on-prem data center. You can take that application, change a little bit of code for high availability, and easily implement that into your environment.

So the example we have here is a medical company. They want to link their old legacy system with their modern mobile application. In looking at how to do this, they migrate their system into the cloud native platform, more like a lift and shift at this point, but they're going to take advantage of some of the benefits of the cloud. They're going to take advantage of those load-balancing capabilities, the geo-capabilities, so they're closer to the customers. They'll probably take advantage of some of the services offerings for the data set using Cloud SQL.

As a result, it allows their customers to interact with their application much easier, whether that's booking appointments, or being more interactive on the scheduling. It gives more flexibility in this case for the doctors to have easier and more flexible access to the patient information prior to the time of visit.

When we talk about what Redapt offers, we're going to focus on a few items here. But, really that business transformation. When you decide to add the cloud into your environment, you're adding extension to your on-prem data center, or you are changing your whole approach, if you're going to go 100% cloud for your environment. There is a bit of a transformation that needs to happen. There's a cultural change. There's a bit of an approach change to the IT environment, how it's developed, and what its focus is.

With Redapt, we help you navigate and implement the necessary changes. We understand what on-premise data centers look like. We understand what cloud optimization looks like, we understand where the benefits are to each of those, and we really help you navigate these decisions as to where an application should reside. How do you leverage the cloud and the cloud services to their fullest capabilities, given the application and the constraints you might have around the business things you would operate today?

We want to make this journey as seamless as possible. We're leveraging experience and skills. We have proven methodologies and solutions that help customers adopt the cloud in many different ways, similar to the three we just talked about.

We have a customer that actually decided to move their entire data center up into GCP. What we were able to do was help them. We were able to help them understand the capabilities of GCP with their environment, as well as the future GCP capabilities coming down the road. They wanted some of the stuff that was not quite in general release yet. We were able to help them understand what that was and get them into a pre-release program, so they could test it out. Ultimately, when it becomes available, they can start leveraging it immediately.

Leveraging the skills we have at Redapt, and the partnership we have with Google, we're able to quickly integrate, not only their systems into GCP, but do a bunch of knowledge-sharing as well, shortening the curve for those soft costs, as far as understanding the skill sets and understanding how to transition from an on-prem into a cloud.

Ultimately, we gave them a better understanding of the environment, not only from a technical standpoint, but also from available discounts and how to leverage the cost models available in GCP. The second thing we'd like to focus on is simplicity. It can be complex. You're adding another data center. Granted, it's the public cloud, but it is another data center into your environment. There's a full life cycle to how you adopt that, whether you're in the plan and design phase, whether you're building it out now and migrating it in, whether you just want to run and operate it and keep it going, or you want to optimize it.

Maybe you've had some assets deployed in the cloud, but it was not done quite as accurately as you'd hoped. Maybe it's not scaling the way you want. Maybe it's costing more than you expected it to. You want to come in and optimize what's going on there. We can step in on any step of the way and help you simplify your journey into the cloud. We can help you with the life cycle management. We've had customers where they've come in and they just weren't happy with the cloud, the way that they've deployed it.

We've been able to help them right-size for best practices and optimization, and even more. We have one customer where the TAM led a discussion that ultimately reduced the spend by $6,000 a month, just by taking advantage of some programs that offered committed-use discounts and things like that. We really want to work with you to help you realize the true value of the cloud environment and what you need for the business to scale.

So 24/7 support, we go beyond just the standard ticket management. We provide an understanding around how you manage tickets, how you resolve issues that arise and quickly communicate those, certainly we add that, but also go beyond that. We understand available discount levels. We understand right-sizing environments to ensure you're optimized.

We understand how to leverage new and upcoming technologies into that cloud for your environment, so you can get some optimization whether it's more in line with performance, or whether it's a cost savings. We're constantly looking at the cost models. We're not only doing historical trending of what's going on by looking at real-time usage, but we also have a forecast model. So you can forecast based off of the trending and usage history, what it's going to look like going forward.

That's where we really can build optimization recommendations - working with the TAM and that single point of contact in Redapt. You can continue to work together to make sure that you're optimized in what your cloud is able to do and how it's performing.

When you're looking to move into the cloud, you want to find the right partner. There are a few questions you should ask when you're looking at partners. The first one is whether this managed service partner is an approved cloud partner. Believe it or not, there is an approval process for the cloud, so you can essentially show your competence in the cloud and meet levels of expertise that are required to truly adopt the cloud correctly and appropriately for your environment.

What tier is their partnership? There are tiers of how qualified and how capable partners are with the cloud, especially with GCP. Do they know how to spell it or do they actually really know how to integrate with it? Can they get in contact with the engineering folks at Google and work through any issues, or are they aware and have access to pre-release items and things like that?

The 24/7 support - are they there when you are? Are they following your customer's ability to access that environment and responding quickly to any incidents that come up? How do they engage with you as a partner? You want a partner that truly is a partner, that has someone who is vested in your success of using the cloud, rather than just another name on the list and another line item in a monitoring tool. How much experience do they have?

There are several things you need to look at. The design of the cloud. How are you adopting the cloud? What are those migration approaches to the cloud? We talked about three of them today. Typically, you're going to find a combination of all three of those when you're moving an environment into the cloud. You really need to have a partner that understands the whole concept of cloud, from architecture, governance, design, adoption, and migration.

With Redapt, we are a certified Google manage services partner and we are a Google Cloud Platform premium partner, as well. We've met all the requirements to be a premium partner with Google and their GCP environment. A partner that really understands the role of governance in the public cloud. This is important, because governance is different. When it's on-prem and your traditional data center that you might be managing and running today, versus what you do in the cloud.

It is a different environment. You do have to approach things slightly differently. We need a partner who can translate the on-premise requirements to the cloud capabilities and how those requirements are going to be met. You want to make sure you're not designing and developing a cloud environment that's going to box you into a corner. You want it to be able to scale and still meet your requirements, whether they're compliance requirements, security requirements, or cost requirements. Whatever those might be, you want to make sure that the partner truly understands how that translation is going to happen from the on-premise world into the cloud world.

Addressing key items to maintain control over your cloud deployment. That's one of the things that we see, is a lot of organizations will jump into the cloud and they're really excited to adapt that cloud, and then they feel like they've lost control over their environment. There's something to be said when you have an IT structure, you've got servers and lights blinking, and you can go in there and physically interact with those, versus taking it up into the cloud, or into the data center.

It's a different mentality as far as managing and maintaining control over that. That's what we really want to do with governance. We want to bring all that to the forefront. You not only understand the cost management aspect of it, you understand how to manage all the resources in the cloud. How is your compliance being met? What are the monitoring and alerting capabilities, and are you getting those appropriately?

Then, working through any kind of audit assistance you might have. You might have a PCI audit that comes up on a periodic basis and you want somebody to work with. We certainly help out with all of these things, as well as interacting with our available advisory services.

To continue, a partner that really understands the environment. When we're talking about capabilities, in addition to Redapt’s managed services practice that we've really been focused on, there are several other practice areas that really round out the offering of capabilities. We have a modern data center team that - really think of it as the tip of the spear for your cloud journey. It focuses on that lift and shift. It focuses on the architecture environment, the securities that are there in compliance, and governance needs that need to happen.

We have a team focused on DevOps experiencing with leveraging containers, focusing on that replatforming model to bring your environment up into the cloud with just minor tweaks and a few changes. We have a team that's really focused on application modernization. This is what they do. They take monolithic applications and they rewrite those to make the most of the public cloud. This is that refactoring that we talked about.

They're able to come in and help organizations retool an existing or a monolithic application and make it cloud-ready in a very short period of time. In addition to that, we have advanced analytics that come in and help you better understand your data. It provides more insights into the meaning of that data and leveraging that information to connect with your customers better.

We also have a really strong foundation with on-premise data centers and build-outs. This provides us a solid understanding of what is needed to successfully transition from an on-prem world into a cloud world. We're not just focused on one or the other. We actually have capabilities across both of those. So understanding your current environment, understanding what the capabilities of the cloud are, and connecting those dots to make sure that the experience of integrating with the cloud in your environment is a positive experience. That broad knowledge across all aspects of your organization is going to help smooth that transition of adopting to the cloud.

Finally, we want to talk about that single point of contact. We really believe in having somebody who is your advocate, who is looking out for your needs - that technical account manager works with your IT team, works very closely with the managed services team at Redapt, and really connects the dots. They’re the liaison ensuring your business needs are being met and that you have a point of escalation if needed for any kind of questions, or anything that's going on in your environment.

We want you to feel comfortable to reach out to the technical account manager and have any kind of conversations you need, as far as future or current state in that environment. We really want to tailor that service, tailor the delivery plan, and the service reviews. We've been able to work with the customer who is operating in all three major clouds, GCP, Azure, and AWS. Via their TAM relationship with Redapt and our monthly business reviews, we're able to really have a solid budgeting discussion across all the cloud platforms. We bring all that reporting into a single pane of glass for them, so they're able to understand what that consumption analysis is.

Look at the right-sizing recommendations and ask if they are leveraging the cloud to the fullest, and not overspending on anything. That technical account manager truly is the liaison to your business, to ensure you get the most out of your cloud environment.

In conclusion, we want to remind you - the cloud is ready for your workloads. The cloud offers efficiencies and capabilities that most organizations may not be able to implement, whether it's geo-relocation, whether it's load balancing, whether it's denial of service protection, whether it's instant scale up and scale back capabilities. It's ready to be leveraged into the cloud at a very low cost for integrating.

Leveraging a cloud partner will simplify and accelerate the transition. You want to make it an easy and a fun experience adopting this new technology of the cloud. Leveraging a partner will help make that an effective use of time and an effective project to get cloud integrated into your environment. And then ultimately an effective cloud management services partner will ensure that you're leveraging the cloud to its fullest abilities, ensure that you understand what those costs are and what your consumption rate is.

And that you're just integrated to the best way possible to support the business as it grows. And finally working with Redapt, we are a premier partner for business transformation. We've served thousands of clients. We've migrated millions of users into the cloud. This is something that we've been doing many, many, many years. We have the capability that span both the depth and the breadth of today's IT environment from consulting to the support that we offer that's there. And we really want to understand your business and help you take advantage of what the cloud transformation journey is.

We have the experience and the expertise to take you on that journey and to really help you understand what the ROI is and what your investments are going to look like. So we're happy to work with you and excited to continue to learn more about your business. I appreciate your time today.

David Cantu: 42:33 Awesome. Thank you, Chad. That was an awesome presentation and I think I'm just as equally impressed that you haven't been interrupted by family members or a pet while we're all working from home. Good job. I did get a question. Do you have time to answer any?

Chad Stanfield: 42:52 Absolutely.

David Cantu: 42:53 Okay. One of attendees asked while at another organization, our team experienced larger than expected cloud bills from time to time. How do you balance governance, cost control with the need to innovate? The reason that a lot of people are attracted to cloud?

Chad Stanfield: 43:15 Absolutely. That's a great question. What we find is in organizations, when they get the capabilities the cloud has to offer, they get excited and they start testing and playing with everything. And they might not be thinking about the cost of implementing that. So they might have it improperly scaled for a test environment versus a development, versus a production environment. So working together will help you understand what that scale looks, will help you understand what those costs are before implementation actually occurs.

A good example is in a development environment, we'll make sure that, that asset shuts down on Friday evening. So you're not being charged through the weekend, and then it powers back up Monday morning. So you're ready to go when the work week starts. There's lots of little tips, kind of tricks if you will, to ensure that you're getting the most optimal costs as you're adapting into the cloud and taking advantage of what's there.

The other thing is the cost management. A lot of times the native cost reporting in the cloud platform is not as visible as we would like it to be as from a customer standpoint. So here at Redapt, we've leveraged other tools that give us more robust reporting so you can truly understand where is that cost going? You can pinpoint it down to a single asset, whether it's a storage asset or a compute asset or anything in between and know exactly where that spend is going to make sure that there's some optimization that might be needed. We can implement that quickly.

David Cantu: 44:45 Okay, awesome. Just one more rolled in. This is a little bit more detailed, but when there are cost anomalies kind of related to the last question of spikes and utilization that are unexpected or forecast, how quickly can a customer be alerted?

Chad Stanfield: 45:05 Yeah. So we do real time monitoring on that. So how it works is the monitoring goes off. If there's a spike incurred, let's just say there's a 5% increase, there's a variable setting that we can put on a per customer basis. But let's say you've got that spike, the support engineers as well as your TAM will be notified immediately of that. And then the TAM is going to reach out to the contact of the organization and say, "Hey, we're seeing an anomaly. Is this intended or is this something we need to investigate further and go into that?" So we try to keep that period of time very short. Typically, it'd be less than an hour for that communication to occur during the business hours.

David Cantu: 45:44 Okay. Perfect. That kind of covered the two inbound questions that I had.

Chad Stanfield: 45:50 Fantastic.

David Cantu: 45:51 All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. We appreciate it. And thanks.

Chad Stanfield: 45:58 Thank you. Bye, everybody.