IBM Cloudability optimizes cloud costs and operations
JBCC has helped more than 600 customer companies migrate to the cloud with its EcoOne cloud service, with full support ranging from cloud architecture to operations and beyond.
However, after migrating to the cloud and starting to use public cloud services, an increasing number of customers began to have problems with invoices for cloud services being higher than expected.
There were various reasons for this, including more resources than necessary being allocated to servers and applications, increased log and backup files, and temporarily allocated resources remaining even after cloud use ended. One concerning factor was how difficult these situations were to grasp in the moment. The depreciation of the Japanese yen's exchange rate against the US dollar was another major factor.
To remedy these customer concerns, JBCC has been providing operational status evaluation reports for multi-cloud environments to help optimize cloud utilization.
Although reports compatible with multi-cloud environments were issued through EcoOne's existing services, recommendation reports were issued separately from each cloud, and the results were dependent on criteria and accuracy for each cloud service. To this end, verification by a specialized SE being necessary when actually changing configurations also became an issue.
In order to solve these issues, JBCC leveraged IBM Cloudability.
IBM Cloudability captures billing data from major cloud providers, normalizes and structures the data, and visualizes all costs on a single screen. To this end, even in the fluctuating public cloud expenditure model, it's possible to compare usage status and cost for each business division within a company from many angles, analyze them from an accounting perspective, and identify any financial abnormalities.
IBM Cloudability includes features of IBM Turbonomic that provide automated operational decision-making and actions that facilitate AI-powered optimization of cloud resources. With these capabilities, it reduces operational burden while continuously ensuring performance and cost optimization, enabling smarter cloud investments.
What JBCC was able to do with IBM Cloudability:
- The logic for determining recommended configurations was revamped to enable comprehensive configuration decisions.
- Unified reporting with multiple cloud services, including Azure CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) provided by Microsoft, was made possible.
- In addition to calculating the optimal amount of resources, necessary adjustments associated with configuration changes and other prerequisites were provided, making recommendations for configurations that could be applied in practice.
- Highly accurate sizing optimization assessments were provided over a period of 90 days maximum, including preliminary configuration change impact projections.
- In addition to downsizing, optimal recommendations for upsizing were provided, enabling flexible configuration selection according to JBCC's customers' business.
- Automatically issue risk reports associated with configuration changes enabled an understanding of the impact of changes in advance.
- Abnormal expense detection was added to minimize unnecessary costs by enabling early detection of erroneous operations such as misconfiguration, unexpected cost increases due to unauthorized environment settings and abnormal communications in the instance of malware infection.
Combining IBM Cloudability's flexible pay-as-you-go billing with an ESA (Embedded Solution Agreement) has made it possible for small- to medium-sized enterprises to start small with a sense of cost and scope that suits their size. Providing managed services has also led to an improvement with regard to the IT operation personnel shortage faced by Japanese small- and medium-sized enterprises.
Further, GPU (graphics processing unit) resources, which are in increasingly high demand worldwide, are known to be valuable while also expensive.
Optimizing resources and costs related to GPU instances can be highly effective, including reducing power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
JBCC Corporation is an IT services company that handles everything from system design to infrastructure and operations, with a focus on cloud services. The company focuses on ultra-high-speed system development. Combined with security and AI services, they solve customers' system issues with technological capability and speed.
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