Cognizant offers Cloud360, a comprehensive cloud management platform.
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Spot by NetApp
Score 6.4 out of 10
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Spot by NetApp, now including CloudCheckr, helps companies to run their cloud investments. The Spot product suite uses machine learning and analytics to automate and optimize cloud infrastructure, to ensure that workloads and applications always have the best possible infrastructure that is available, scalable and available at the lowest possible cost. Spot’s technology provides insights into cloud costs, recommendations for how to optimize utilization and costs, and automation to implement…
Cognizant Cloud 360 is very well suited for cloud integration of modern, common software among users of a wide spectrum of proficiency levels. The user interface is well designed and intuitive, and all common software tools have existing implementation tools and intuitive platforms for cloud migration. Cognizant Cloud 360 is not as useful when most users are highly technically competent and use specialized, less common software tools that are to be migrated to the cloud platform. Cognizant is technically sound, but maybe not as much as some established competitors (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc) and also may not have familiarity with lesser-known software applications.
CloudCheckr is fantastic for those that are purely in the Cloud as it provides everything you need under one roof for a comprehensive configuration and usage monitoring tool. It has SysLog capabilities though so you can farm out the alerts into a SIEM or other log management system, so hybrid environments could also benefit from its use.
Very good customer service team. Very responsive to inquiries, and willing to collaboratively develop solutions to software Platform integration challenges.
Very intuitive user interface. Layout for various tools and settings is well-conceived and implemented, and the software is ultimately very easy to navigate for even novice users.
Customizable resource library. The platform makes it easy to select tools that are needed without forcing you to subscribe to additional tools that are not needed.
Detailed Best Practices. It's important to align your cloud to industry best practices for security and cost—it just performs better if it's used the way it's meant to be used. AWS is very flexible, and that's great when you have special requirements, but you've got to at least know when you're using something in a non-standard way so you can think through the implications.
Cost Reduction. Some recommendations are almost impossible to make at least for our setup, but many, many others are easy. We only have to log into CloudCheckr every few months and make a few changes for it to more than pay for itself.
Right-Sizing. This is related to the other points, but for some reason is separate from their cost module. The metrics it's able to pull only tell half the story, so it's good to verify it's sizing recommendations before making changes. But it does show you what instances to focus on first, and even if you choose a slightly different size to move it to, it does clearly indicate it's current size isn't appropriate. And this works both ways, if the size is too big, you can save some cash by making it smaller, but if it's too small, you want to be sure to scale up before you run into performance problems.
Could improve in agility in the delivery life cycle. When customer demands change and abrupt changes in resources and configuration are required, the change order process is not as quick as desired.
Advanced technical competence and knowledge of a wide variety of specialized software applications is a bit lacking. Relative to some competitor software from Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, or HP, Cognizant isn’t as technically inclined and ready to handle issues with less common software tools.
Not as forthcoming with status updates as some competitors. In cases of interruptions or upcoming updates, Cognizant doesn’t disclose timely and detailed information unless it is specifically requested by the user.
CloudCheckr features have a tendency to break without warning. Functionality in place for months could suddenly stop working.
CloudCheckr support often delays work on support tickets for fixing broken application functionality.
The CloudCheckr platform and documentation website often crash or experience performance degradation.
CloudCheckr cost reporting is often impacted by faulty code or broken report functionality. This can contribute to a low level of confidence in CloudCheckr's ability to deliver accurate cost reporting.
Overall, CloudCheckr covers all our AWS monitoring needs and great integration through SysLog into our SIEM to capture alerts for investigation. The reports are great and allow for an easy daily review. Small improvements could be made to the interface and better filtering in places would be good. Great product and the price is fair.
Support is very timely and thorough in their responses to inquiries, and also is very willing to help in finding collaborative solutions to any technical challenges. Overall, the only negative is they may not be as equipped or ready to proactively handle some more customized requests as a more established competitor would be. This is more of a reflection of the software than the support team.
Cognizant Cloud 360 has more of a modern look to it and most of the same functionality. I prefer the layout of Cognizant as I find it more intuitive for a variety of users, but Microsoft’s is also pretty well laid out. Microsoft is more established and has more experience in integrating a wide variety of applications, and so is more ready and equipped to handle less common application cloud integration.
There are a few products out there that'll do an aspect or two of what CloudCheckr does, but I honestly couldn't find anything nearly as comprehensive as CloudCheckr.
Cognizant Cloud 360 has saved on overall hardware costs, as many resources have been migrated to the cloud platform and local storage and hardware systems are no longer needed.
There was an initial period of negative return as the migration was occurring, as some applications were interrupted, which in turn interrupted the flow of projects and inhibited the timely allocation of resources.
Another positive return can be measured in time savings, as users can more easily access applications from the central cloud source versus various locally customized network locations.
