Cloud Technology Partners, A Born-In-The-Cloud Solution Provider, Releases Cost And Compliance Control Tools For AWS

Cloud Technology Partners, a cloud services provider that has scaled its business in recent years by investing in innovation, has launched the first components of a soon-to-be-expanding suite of management tools for enterprise customers.

CTP is leveraging the intellectual property developed implementing cloud solutions and the experience gained through hundreds of those enterprise engagements to deliver to its Amazon Web Services' customers automated and configurable services that continuously monitor cloud spending and adherence to compliance frameworks—two major concerns that often inhibit cloud adoption.

While the born-in-the-cloud solution provider based in Boston works closely with all three hyper-scale providers—including Microsoft and Google—demand is surging for the industry leader, which is why CTP debuted the product this week for AWS workloads, Brian Ott, CTP's managed services practice lead, told CRN.

[Related: 8 Products And Features Unveiled At AWS Summit 2017]

"There's a lot of intellectual property, pattern recognition here, and our differentiated expertise," Ott said of the tools made accessible to customers as a service, illustrative of a trend in which channel partners are increasingly converting their internal capabilities into software products.

CTP's new Managed Cloud Controls start with helping customers get a handle on their cloud spend.

"There's an almost unlimited supply of capabilities and services" available in Amazon's cloud, Ott said. Developers sometimes get so enthusiastic about the multitude of features at their disposal that they end up spending more than originally envisioned by their companies.

CTP's continuous cost-control service evaluates the customer's legacy costs, projects cloud spend into the future, and analyzes whether the organization is on track to reduce those historical costs while helping figure out optimization strategies.

While saving cash is no longer the prime driver for cloud adoption, it's still a very important factor, Ott said. An AWS bill that runs amok can lead a CFO to hit the brakes.

"It's an important data point you need to have your arms around at all times because it's one of the things that will sidetrack your use of cloud," he told CRN.

On the cost-control front, CTP has partnered with CloudHealth, a Boston-based cloud management platform that feeds spending data into its service.

On the compliance side, CTP has partnered with Dome9 to offer an out-of-the-box solution that allows customers to implement policy rules tied to several regulatory compliance frameworks, Ott said.

The service continuously compares user behavior against pre-configured compliance policies, monitoring where data is stored, encryption and chain of custody. It ensures in real time the organization never handles data in a way that would run afoul of an audit.

The idea to build out the suite of customer tools was conceived last summer, about the time CTP partnered with Rackspace on a systems integration and managed services package.

CTP will follow a road map for building out that offering, targeting a rollout of the same initial services for Microsoft's Azure cloud in the next quarter. New compliance frameworks and services will follow, Ott said.