For companies moving data operations to the cloud and running applications there, consolidating security and compliance becomes the next logical step. This is where the complexity of operations increases, and often so does the cost.

Automating away these complexities and lowering related costs is the goal of MontyCloud Inc.’s intelligent cloud management platform, according to Venkat Krishnamachari (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of MontyCloud.

“What we do is we help IT teams simplify their cloud operations,” he said. “With our platform, our customers, without adding any specialized cloud skills or adding any multiple point tools, they can still enable their teams to provision, manage, operate the cloud and reduce the ongoing cloud operations cost by 70%.”

Krishnamachari spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. They discussed pain points for cloud operations, how MontyCloud addresses these issues for customers, and how its platform solves the cloud skills gap problem. (* Disclosure below.)

Solutions from day 1

MontyCloud promises to help businesses on their cloud journey beginning day 1, when they move their applications to kickstart their digital transformation. During this stage, it’s common for teams to provision wildly, without any control, which results in a bill that is much larger than expected.

To prevent this from happening, enterprises need to consume the cloud with well-designed principles in mind from the start, according to Krishnamachari. MontyCloud makes this job smoother by offering pre-built, standardized provisioning templates.

“We call this shifting left,” he said. “The right way to consume the cloud … is to ensure that when you provision itself, there is a notion of well-architected principles in place, [and that] security, compliance, costs are being addressed in the provisioning aspects.”

Businesses that are on day 2 of cloud operations, already dealing with layers upon layers of available resources, can also benefit from the platform, he added. They can plug in to gain near-automatic visibility into their operations and start simplifying and managing them better.

“[These enterprises] can go to MontyCloud.com, sign up for a free trial, connect their cloud accounts, [and] within few minutes, they’re going to get free recommendations on where they can optimize costs, where they can improve security. What are the compliance issues they can solve?” Krishnamachari explained. “They can further customize the platform to their needs.”

The platform combines a record system with an engagement and intelligence systems. The record tool delivers historic visibility into cloud environments, such as a timeline of events, details about what happened to the environment and who made the change, while the engagement engine reduces the cloud surface area with which the customers need to handle with a streamlined user interface and interactive bots.

The intelligence system unlocks context-specific value and speeds up intelligent applications that cost less to operate, self-heal when security or compliance issues occur, and foster collaboration, according to Krishnamachari. It is by eliminating the need for specialized tools or additional talent in the cloud and reducing the time required to deliver digital transformation that MontyCloud enables significant cost savings for customers.

MontyCloud DAY2 technology is built on native Amazon Web Services Inc. resources, such as AWS Systems Manager and AWS CloudFormation. The startup is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, a Public Sector Partner, and certified by Amazon as a cloud management Competency Partner.

Automation solves the skills gap

MontyCloud also aims to help enterprises address the technology skills gap, especially related to cloud solution architects. It is difficult for businesses to train IT professionals quickly enough to keep up with the rapid evolution of the cloud. The company’s platform solves this issue by automating key specialized functions that would be filled by expensive and hard-to-find talent, according to Krishnamachari.

“Imagine adding a highly skilled cloud solutions architect in under 10 minutes to your teams? That’s one of the values of our platform,” he said. “We have pre-built, well-architected solutions in the platform that acts like your own cloud solution architect.”

MontyCloud says it differentiates itself from competitors by being a comprehensive management platform for all stages of cloud transformation, as they are interconnected. This means that companies do not need to have different suppliers to meet each of their needs.

“From onboarding to provisioning and consumption, to governance, to security, compliance and ongoing operations with costs and context in mind, we are the only platform that offers that,” Krishnamachari stated.

Although MontyCloud is a startup with just 23 employees, it has Fortune 100 customers. For example, it helped a global user to move applications to the cloud, manage them, and resize its cloud team. The company had a five-member team watching over a farm of more than 10,000 servers for compliance needs and was able to redirect four team members to other projects due to the use of compliance bots.

“This is what we mean by empowering our customers and making that cloud team, the traditional IT team into cloud powerhouses. They can do more with less, and they can keep track of the cloud consumption in the right way,” Krishnamachari concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Analytics, and Cloud Management Tools event. (* Disclosure: MontyCloud Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither MontyCloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE