How it worksCentralize RI & SP management

Centralize RI & SP management

We use purpose-built technology to manage RIs & SPs centrally. This is more efficient, enables greater discount coverage, creates more opportunities to manage the lock-in risk and removes the overhead from individual teams and engineers.

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Maximize the opportunity

AWS applies the benefits of RI and SP commitments to your usage on an hourly basis. If there isn’t enough eligible usage, the commitment will cost you more than it saved for that hour. Individual environments, managed by individul teams, may not have enough eligible usage to make a commitment cost effective so miss out on savings. We avoid this by committing based on your combined usage.

RIs and SPs combine together in a way that makes it easy for one to displace another and accidentally put you into a position of wasting money. A central commitment management team avoids this conflict.

Operate with transparency

All the RIs & SPs we manage are registered to dedicated “commitment holding accounts”. These are AWS accounts created specifically for this purpose. This ensures RI & SP discounts can automatically apply where best suited across your organization.

Importantly though it creates complete isolation from your usage accounts to minimize our access requirements. We cannot see the data you store in AWS or impact how you actually use cloud services. This isolation also creates an easy path to audit activity and ensures clear RI & SP ownership.

Use automation wisely

We have developed our own tools to automate analysis, recommendation creation and implementation of RI & SP commitment changes. We have deliberately not automated the decision making on what to implement.

Issues with the cost and usage data could trigger automated actions that reduce cost efficiency that can’t be reversed. Historical data isn’t always a good predictor of future needs. We incorporate what you can share about your wider plans. We adjust the blend of RIs & SPs used and react more quickly to usage changes than having to wait to ensure a change is not a short-term anomaly.

"Thanks to Strategic Blue, we’re maximizing our cloud investment and propelling our business forward. Truly a must-have partner!"

"It comes down to perfect customer support. Strategic Blue are responsive, experts, helpful, and friendly. They make you feel like you are the only customer that counts."

Nate O’Farrell

Commonwealth Fusion Systems

Stephen Wright

University of Leicester

Our Strategic Blue Experts

Rate optimization with RI & SP commitments is ideally suited to specialist third-party approaches. It requires no specific knowledge of what you’re doing in the cloud, how you’ve configured services to work together and what outcomes they’re delivering.

The key aspects of a successful approach can be applied equally well to any organization:

Analytical tools that match usage patterns to the AWS pricing model
Strategies that can account for the bigger picture, react to usage changes and adapt to organization’s individual priorities
Automation that ensures timely access to the right information and reliable execution of the right actions

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“We are an extension of our customer’s teams with the added bonus of an approach proven at a range of other organizations.”

Ecaterina Baza, Account Manager

“We are an extension of our customer’s teams with the added bonus of an approach proven at a range of other organizations.”

Ecaterina Baza, Account Manager

Partner with confidence

We’re proud of the part we play in supporting what our customers achieve from their use of AWS. We understand that security, consistency and continuous improvement are crucial.

Secure by design

We use an AWS best practice RBAC, IAM and SCP approach to grant access on a non-intrusive, least-privilege basis. All we need is access to cost and usage metadata. We require no access to the data within your accounts.

Our Security Approach

Consistency & continuous improvement

We adhere to ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 14001 and complete regular audits and certifications. Our teams follow processes and expectations defined in our business management system.

Success Stories

Estimate how much you can save with our cloud cost optimization

Our free Savings Review is a secure way to quickly and easily benchmark how effectively you’re using RIs & SPs. At worst you’ll get third-party validation of your current approach, at best you’ll learn how to deliver even better results.

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Our Service Plans

We use our Advanced Commitment Management approach to deliver benefits through two Service Plans. These are tailored to the different needs we’ve found in the Enterprise and public sectors.

Automate for Enterprise

Hassle-free savings for Enterprise customers with large AWS spends. Our fee is paid from the savings we generate. No technical changes, no technical compromises, no precise forecasting and no tedious optimization tasks.

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Accelerate for UK Public Sector

Cloud financial management and resale for UK Public Sector organizations for no service fee. Support your use of AWS with cost optimization, cost and usage reporting, anomaly detection, budget management and optional prepayment for services.

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Our other pillars of rate optimization

Centralized management is just one of our three pillars of rate optimization that we use to transform your cloud strategy.

Balance risk & reward

We combine small, frequent purchases of SPs and Convertible RIs with the RI Marketplace, and optional use of upfront payments. This allows us to access 3-year discount rates without locking you into a specific usage or spending pattern for 3 years.

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