Taking a bird’s-eye view of the clouds with the DoiT console

One Data began working with DoiT in 2022 on its AWS and Google Cloud accounts. With numerous standalone accounts across the two providers, One Data first had to locate all the accounts and then bring them together in one centralized location: the DoiT console. This gave the company a single point of access to visualize and manage all its cloud accounts. It also provided governance capabilities through DoiT console to ensure each account was properly controlled, with clear responsibility for each, along with central oversight.

Impressed with its ability to use DoiT to manage its AWS and Google Cloud accounts, One Data then moved its Azure accounts too. “We were using a third-party vendor, and were finding it difficult to compare our Azure invoices with our other accounts,” Maik explains. “The timing of the invoices was also a problem, arriving two months after the work had taken place, whereas DoiT’s invoices were always right on time. We moved all our Azure accounts to DoiT in just a week. It was a flawless transition.”

Visualizing and controlling cloud costs

One Data can now use the console to manage all its cloud accounts in one place and visualize and control its costs. Maik and his team quickly got to grips with the intuitive console, with a DoiT Cloud Reliability Engineer (CRE) offering a workshop to share further tips on how to make the most of its functionality.

“With our accounts aggregated with DoiT, it is much easier to compare invoices between the different cloud providers and identify the resources we are using, instance by instance, customer by customer,” explains Christoph Buchner, Team Lead IT – Admins & Cloud Services at One Data. “We can see not only what costs a cloud account is generating, but what specific resources are contributing to those costs.”

The team can also attribute expenditure to particular accounts and resources, and then use the console to generate reports at the push of a button to help departments across the business visualize cloud expenditure. For example, One Data needs to create monthly and annual cost summaries for its finance team to help with budget forecasting. Previously this was done manually by copying data into a spreadsheet, a process that took eight to 10 hours every month.

“Now, with the console, we can generate reports in minutes,” says Maik. “Our financial team has access to the product as well, with fancy graphs and bars to visualize all they need. It’s everything a financial team could dream of.”

Securing discounts and avoiding cost spikes with DoiT technology

With this level of insight into its cloud costs, One Data now manages its resource usage on an ongoing basis to keep its costs under control. It can also use Cloud Analytics within the DoiT console to forecast upcoming cloud expenditure and understand the impact of its cost-management measures.

One Data also uses DoiT Flexsave™ to help reduce its AWS bill. Flexsave identifies any of One Data’s compute workloads that aren’t already covered by commitment-based discounts and automatically applies discounted rates to those workloads, helping to reduce the amount the company spends on compute power on demand.

With Anomaly Detection, meanwhile, One Data can quickly spot any unexpected spikes in expenditure and take fast action to reconfigure its services to bring those costs back down before they accumulate. For example, the company was recently alerted to an unexpected cost rise of 10% per month in one of its Azure accounts. “Using the console, we broke down the resources and services we were using and identified why the costs were increasing, and then quickly made adjustments to put things right,” Maik recalls.

Centralizing control with effective identity and access management

Since working with DoiT, One Data’s approach to cloud governance not only covers FinOps, but also extends to the way it handles identity and access management for all its cloud accounts. Previously, with developers setting up their own accounts, certain accounts were difficult to find, while others were difficult to access once those developers left, taking their access credentials with them. With DoiT’s help, One Data is following best practices in terms of access controls, account administration, and user lifecycle management.

“When access isn’t properly managed, you can end up with shadow IT, with no central control,” Maik explains. “With DoiT we have brought all our individual accounts into one platform and we are in charge of every single account, including their creation and decommissioning. We have ultimate responsibility for it all.”

Solving issues quickly with efficient technical support

Whenever One Data runs into challenges with its use of cloud services, it turns to the DoiT team for support. By granting DoiT CREs access to its live cloud environment, One Data enables them to explore issues in detail and quickly get to the heart of the problem. The CREs can then provide detailed advice, troubleshooting, or step-by-step solutions to help One Data resolve issues.

“The DoiT team is always very quick to respond,” says Maik. “I typically get a response from my account manager within one to two hours, and it usually takes less than 16 hours to receive a proper technical answer to any problem. It’s really helpful not to have to wait when you’re in a high-pressure situation.”