MontyCloud Collaborates with AWS Built-in to Drive and Simplify AWS Consumption

AWS Built-in and Amazon Bedrock are enabling MontyCloud to further simplify cloud operations with the MontyCloud CloudOps Copilot (see Figure 2). The goal is to empower organizations to transform faster with the power of cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), in natural ways, and without needing deep expertise in cloud services. By building on top of Amazon Bedrock, MontyCloud delivers AWS native, generative AI-powered solutions that help customers innovate more and operate less.

Also, MontyCloud customers can now safely provision a generative AI environment in their AWS accounts in about 10 minutes. They can upload data and interact with their own chatbot, all starting at about $70 a month with additional AWS infrastructure costs.

AWS Built-in has also helped simplify MontyCloud’s CloudTrail Lake offering, a feature that lets customers track MontyCloud events directly from the platform. With AWS Built-in, customers can automate audit readiness without doing additional configuration. According to Mitch, “With AWS Built-in driving this integration, we’ve added yet another simplification to our platform. Customers now have an automated way to carry out audits of CloudOps events performed by MontyCloud. We’ve essentially given them a single source of truth with added business context.”

With AWS Built-in integration, MontyCloud customers are saving money, especially in infrastructure costs. “Cloud Financial Operations companies may be experts in providing recommendations for saving money, but these services can be expensive and time-consuming,” says Mitch. “Because of our tight integration with AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and AWS Compute Optimizer, we can pull up granular costs and deliver actionable cost optimization recommendations in the context of a customer’s business directly in our platform. We can enact cost savings in minutes.”

Mitch provides an example of a customer who saved a quarter of a million dollars in just 10 minutes by using MontyCloud to optimize their Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes and clean up snapshots on the spot. “They didn't have to go into the AWS Management Console and hunt down each of those volumes. That alone saved a lot of time, but they were also able to spin down infrastructure they weren't using almost immediately.”

With AWS Built-in, MontyCloud can initiate cost optimization enhancements and remediations with automated MAP tagging and AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews in under 30 minutes. “This is a huge selling point for our partners. Providing that level of personalization to customers can really help them win over professional services projects. Instead of all the normal churn, they can help customers deploy new workloads and modernize their environment by implementing additional components like more containers or cloud-native databases.”

“AWS Built-in provides our partners with verified, vetted, and reliable automation that makes them more competitive in the marketplace,” says Mitch. Partners can show customers their options for AWS foundational services like Control Tower, CloudTrail, Security Hub, and GuardDuty and run assessments to see how their current environment rates when tested against AWS best practices and the AWS Well-Architected Framework. They can discuss the findings and put them into business context for the customer. And if they decide to try a particular AWS service, they can enable them with that service on the spot.

AWS Built-in is helping MontyCloud help customers become differentiated as AWS Partners. “This is true for our larger enterprises, MSPs, and systems integrators,” says Mitch. “It helps solve the churn and noise of deploying services and operating multi-tenant cloud environments. Partners can manage multiple customer accounts in one place. And because of AWS Built-in’s integration with AWS Organizations, partners can onboard multiple customer accounts simultaneously and have a full view into how their AWS infrastructure is set up in about 10-15 minutes.”

As an early adopter of the AWS Built-in program, MontyCloud piloted its solution with fellow AWS partners Innovative Solutions and North Labs. The results they achieved were even better than anticipated.

Innovative Solutions, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner that specializes in cloud consulting, cloud migrations, and cloud-native development, uses MontyCloud as its customer enablement platform for installing their three individual tiers of managed services. Using MontyCloud’s AWS Built-in solution, they onboarded 40 customers and got them up and running with a fully configured cloud environment in an afternoon. For each customer, they were able to provision new services and conduct AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews in just a few minutes without writing any code or deep diving into customer’s accounts. This gave the Innovative Solutions’ team time to spend with customers and discuss additional services.

According to Mitch, “The time savings we provided Innovative Solutions was just amazing. They were able to onboard 40 customers in an afternoon, and they still had their regular responsibilities. They were doing other things in parallel. In the future, we expect our customers to have junior employees deploying entire cloud infrastructures in minutes, and manage them without writing code.”

North Labs, a cloud consultant that brings cloud and data transformation solutions to SMB customers in industrial and manufacturing organizations, has integrated MontyCloud’s AWS Built-in solution into its flagship program Data Concierge. “Because of the automation and massive time savings, North Labs is giving their customers time back to focus on ROI tasks that can actually bring in revenue and grow their business,” says Mitch. “They don’t have to hire more consultants or spend time monitoring disparate streams of data. Now they have full visibility into their entire cloud environment and can run reports of usage and cost data in a regulated, consistent fashion.”

MontyCloud’s partners can offset the cost of their professional service projects through the cost savings tools included with MontyCloud’s AWS Built-in solution. Mitch says, “The benefits that come with cost optimization, automated MAP tagging, and AWS Well-Architected Framework reviews alone will more than pay for our DAY2 platform, especially when customers think about the high costs of professional services.”

According to Travis Rehl, Senior Vice President of Product at Innovative Solutions, customer satisfaction is on the rise. “With MontyCloud and AWS Built-in, we’ve greatly reduced the friction for our customers. Because so much of the process is automated now, we’re seeing a lot less churn and mistakes around MAP engagements, passwords, access roles, and other details. The automated deployments from AWS Built-in have been particularly instrumental in closing those gaps.”

“Automated MAP tagging in particular has made a huge difference in costs, especially for our partners like Innovative Solutions,” says Mitch. “With the added capabilities of event collection and tracking, their customers can immediately tag new resources as soon as they’re spun up. The guardrails are there, and the resources are getting there faster.” A top priority for MontyCloud is making sure customers receive the credits they're expecting for AWS to accurately track what their MAP dollars are doing, for example ensuring that MAP Migrate/Modernize funds are actually translating into new workloads.

Out-of-the-box CloudOps automations for patching instances and triggering backups and on-demand scheduled reports also give MontyCloud customers peace of mind. “Company CFOs can get cost optimization summaries in their inbox every week without teams having to analyze and merge data from multiple systems,” says Mitch.

With AWS Built-in, MontyCloud offers significant time savings without sacrificing functionality and quality. “We worked directly with AWS solutions architects to build this solution the right way,” says Mitch. “Just knowing that it’s been tested and validated against AWS best practices is so attractive to our customers.”

MontyCloud frees customers from having to think about basic cloud requirements like storage and compute. Mitch explains, “Because of AWS Built-in, they can see the business impact of their AWS services immediately. Our integration with AWS Config gives customers peace of mind that they’re set up properly and using those services in a safe and efficient way. We’re building trust with customers in that we’re keeping their data safe and simplifying things at the same time.”

AWS Built-in also brings customers significant time savings with onboarding. “Just think about all the training that teams have to go through to understand the various AWS services and how to get them set up properly,” says Mitch. “When customers don’t have to put time and effort into becoming AWS experts, they can focus more on running their business. They innovate more instead of spending time on the undifferentiated shared responsibility burden of cloud management and operations.”

In addition to the AWS Well-Architected remediations and blueprints that MontyCloud offers out of the box, the DAY2 platform is entirely extensible. Some of their larger partners with 100 or more engineers store and manage thousands of Python scripts and CloudFormation or Terraform templates. MontyCloud can access and manage those scripts and templates directly from the platform, giving these organizations time back to win more professional services projects.

AWS Built-in lets MontyCloud give partners and customers opportunities to reinvent themselves without taking a giant risk. “If a customer wants to start conducting research using differentiated AWS services like SageMaker or Bedrock, they can do it in a safe way because of the integrated guardrails. If it doesn’t work out, they can fail fast and move on to the next experiment.”

For example, MontyCloud is currently working with North Labs to implement data modernization for their customers. “Their offering could take a few different shapes. They might use Snowflake or Matillion, or it could implement a mix of Redshift and other AWS native services. But once it’s set up, they can do so many amazing things and differentiate their business, something that would have taken a lot of time and money to find the right experts,” said Mitch. “Combine that with our adjacent cost saving features, and we’ve helped offset the risks of innovation.”

According to Collin Graves, the founder of North Labs, “MontyCloud’s AWS Built-in solution combined with North Labs' experience and reputation represents the fastest path to data modernization in the industry. It lets us move the value needle for customers as early as possible in the relationship by addressing the two most common customer goals—getting the best value from their system data and finding the best way to mitigate risks.”

AWS Built-in has given sales engineers a shiny new tool in their sales toolbox. With so many improvements in deployment and configuration, sales engineers can spend less time with initial setup and more time helping customers customize, innovate, and explore improvement opportunities in their cloud environments.

MontyCloud’s AWS Built-in solution is also helping build trust in the marketplace. “As a startup, participating as launch partners in programs like AWS Built-in—combined with our CloudTrail Lake integration for event auditing and achieving our AWS Cloud Operations Competency status—we’re really getting noticed. More and more Premier Tier and Advanced Tier partners know about us, and they’re helping us close sales cycles.”

AWS Built-in has helped MontyCloud check off items on their roadmap by accelerating feature enhancements for MSPs. Instead of having to onboard one account at a time, they can now onboard hundreds in the same amount of time. “That kind of organizational support is unprecedented. Our partners like Innovative Solutions saw the value when they recently onboarded 40 customers in hours. That leaves them time to start tackling some of that low-hanging fruit like customized configurations and added security.”

Looking ahead, MontyCloud is on a mission to cement themselves as a unicorn in the marketplace. Mitch and his team are currently working with more AWS Premier and Advanced Tier partners, and with the success they’ve already seen with North Labs and Innovative Solutions, they’re fully confident that other organizations will see similar results. “The benefits of AWS Built-in is bringing massive improvements to our MSP and SI partners, and those benefits are trickling down to all their customers. Through our partners, 1000s of customers will soon be using MontyCloud.”

Mitch says, “As a startup, when we see our logo on press releases with leading companies like Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Orca, and Lacework, just being grouped with those titans in the partner community carries a lot of weight. That’s something that really excites our team and investors.”

AWS Built-in lets MontyCloud cater to partners and their customers because they see the long-term value. AWS Built-in and MontyCloud are doing it right for customers. According to Mitch, “doing it right” means setting up AWS foundational services correctly on day one. “Customers know they’re going to have the right guardrails in place from the very start. They're not having to take the time to build solutions and figure out how it all fits together. They just push the button and it gets done.”

AWS Built-in is a giant step forward in MontyCloud’s commitment to make things easier for customers. “This has been our sweet spot, and that’s where we’re going to continue to invest.”

Published November 2023