We recently sat down with Corne Du Preez, Cloud Practice Lead at XContent Business Solutions, to better understand the ‘what, how and why’ of their Cloud Management Platform (CMP) product, XCNimbus. If you have any workloads in Azure, then you should read this interview.

So Corne, what is a CMP and why use one?

A CMP is a management tool which gives you insight into your cloud infrastructure and workloads. When people move from on-premises to the cloud, the single biggest mistake they make is to set up and manage their cloud instance, the same way they did their on-premises setup. While this might seem logical, this can lead to very high costs and potential security vulnerabilities as well as compliance issues. So basically, a CMP like XCNimbus is there to provide insight into these areas and help to mitigate the potential risks.

Can you explain how XCNimbus provides this insight?

Sure! XCNimbus is a soft touch tool, meaning that it only requires read access on a customer’s tenant. It pulls the information directly from the tenant and then with this information, we can provide reporting highlighting potential areas of concern or ways in which a customer may be spending too much money and how we can reduce those costs. It focusses on the three key areas of Costs, Security and Compliance. A well architected cloud environment is essential to be sure that you are getting the most out of your cloud journey and XCNimbus provides the information and understanding for this.

What are the costs associated with a CMP like XCNimbus?

Initially we offer a 14-day sponsored engagement. In this time, we work with the customer to provide read access to their tenant and then we run the tool for 7-10 days and report back on potential areas of focus for the customer. The tool is billed monthly on fixed costs depending on the Azure workload of the customer. There are no long-term contracts, and the customer has the choice of utilising my team’s services, should they not have the skillset of their own, to mitigate any risks which may be found and to enhance their cloud experience.

How does one get in contact with you?

You can visit register.xcnimbus.com and add your contact details and I or one of my team, will be in contact within 24 hours to get things moving or you can email me directly on cornedp@xcontent.com