About B-Tech

B-Tech is a managed service provider with a focus on bringing Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions to SaaS companies, venture capital, and organizations in regulated industries. B-Tech helps their clients migrate their IT environments from on-premises data centers to the cloud, providing strategy, planning, and execution to ensure that their customers’ cloud computing initiatives deliver maximum value.

Optimizing costs through intelligent RI purchasing with Spot Eco

Jon Busey, founder of B-Tech, leverages his technical background to make sure that customers are operating efficiently in the cloud. One of the primary ways in which B-Tech supports customers’ cloud transformation goals is by optimizing their cloud spend with CloudCheckr.

Following CloudCheckr’s acquisition by Spot by NetApp, Spot Eco was integrated within the CloudCheckr platform. Spot Eco automates Reserved Instance (RI) and Savings Plan purchasing and continually optimizes RI and Savings Plan commitment portfolios to achieve the best pricing for cloud services.

B-Tech was first in line to use the Spot Eco integration within CloudCheckr to implement an effective RI strategy for their customers.

Busey encourages clients to use RIs to meet cost resource requirements. And if there is no need for these resources, Spot Eco simply sells them on the AWS RI marketplace, saving Busey time and helping him keep his customers continuously optimized.

Spot Eco doesn’t just benefit B-Tech’s customers. Busey explained that the continuous optimization of those RI commitment portfolios brings him “peace of mind.”

“Now, I don’t have to spend time every day combing through the AWS RI Marketplace to find used three-month RIs. Spot Eco does that for us, and they saved us money on doing that,” said Busey.

Gaining transparency around cloud costs and billing

When B-Tech first began using CloudCheckr a few years ago, they were looking to make billing more efficient. One challenge was that AWS billing at the time was very “opaque,” said Busey. “I wanted a way to consolidate a bunch of invoices across payer accounts, and it was really complicated at the time.”

B-Tech needed a way to understand what services the cloud provider is billing for and be able to allocate costs correctly for customers. “Understanding billing and having a great billing tool are important,” Busey explained. “You can’t just have one or the other.”

With CloudCheckr, B-Tech has access to both. CloudCheckr is essential in helping B-Tech provide their customers with a single, easy-to-understand consolidated bill each month. Using CloudCheckr, B-Tech can easily understand their AWS bills and in turn educate their customers on their cloud spend.

“CloudCheckr helps us understand bills, and we use it really extensively to help customers break down and predict all of their cloud costs,” said Busey.

The CloudCheckr API is also important for B-Tech, enabling them to integrate CloudCheckr’s billing capabilities into their own tools and dashboards for one seamless view. Furthermore, using the robust set of tagging features within CloudCheckr, B-Tech can break down customers’ costs into consumable reports and share this vital information during client meetings.

While the CloudCheckr platform has a very robust set of features, its ease of use is another key benefit. “CloudCheckr has a lot of intelligence under the hood which enables it to produce a simple and clear AWS bill for our customers. Now they can see it all on one sheet of paper instead of forty,” Busey said. “Billing would be a two-day job and a complete mess without CloudCheckr.”

Maintaining compliance through increased resource visibility

Early on, B-Tech saw benefits in using CloudCheckr for more than RI optimization and cloud billing.

“Pretty quickly what I realized was that CloudCheckr also helped me to check a lot of boxes for compliance that at the time were not very simple to do in AWS,” Busey said. Compliance frameworks often require cloud administrators to enable alerts when changes occur and enforce specific policies. According to Busey, “CloudCheckr makes that really, really easy.”

Many of B-Tech’s clients operate in highly regulated industries, such as finance or telecommunications. As a result, they require compliance with stringent regulations around their data and cloud resources. As part of their service offerings, B-Tech helps customers ensure SOC 2 and uses CloudCheckr’s compliance tools to simplify the process.

“It’s really hard to get an inventory of resources across a bunch of accounts — even from one organization — in one place,” said Busey. “With CloudCheckr we can show all of the client’s cloud inventory in a single view, which helps us comply with a SOC 2 requirement. I don’t know of an AWS service that does that.”

Moreover, with CloudCheckr B-Tech can aggregate and report on security and compliance data and bring that information to their customers. “This is helpful for our weekly reports,” Busey said, “and some customers use CloudCheckr’s security alerts as well.”

Enabling reseller operations in a single platform

When it comes to reaching customers, Busey said that CloudCheckr gives B-Tech an advantage over their competition. CloudCheckr helps B-Tech with consolidating costs, maintaining visibility over multiple cloud accounts, and ensuring compliance — all at once.

“In addition to being a superior billing tool, we were impressed by all these other compliance features, inventorying capabilities, and tagging features within CloudCheckr that offer us granular visibility into our customers’ spend,” said Busey.

Busey enthusiastically endorses CloudCheckr for MSPs and resellers looking to optimize their business, saying, “CloudCheckr is the biggest, most complete reseller enablement platform.”