The Center for Data Innovation spoke with Johnny Fitrakis, chief information security officer of Vega Cloud, a software as a service (SaaS) platform that helps businesses save costs by optimizing their cloud infrastructure. Fitrakis discussed how cloud optimization saves businesses money, the role that data plays in Vega Cloud’s technology, and the company’s vision for the future.
Martin Makaryan: What does Vega Cloud do, and how has the company evolved?
Johnny Fitrakis: Our mission is to give organizations the freedom to innovate and efficiently deliver their products and services by optimizing their cloud costs and helping them better manage their data. If you do not use cloud the right way or understand its billing models, costs can dramatically increase.
Chris Posner, who comes from a background in public cloud infrastructure, founded Cloud Vega in 2018. In 2021, we released our general platform, and a year later, the average customer savings were around 22 percent.
Makaryan: What does cloud optimization mean in practice, and why is it important?
Fitrakis: Cloud optimization means cost optimization. Companies come to us when they don’t understand their current cloud costs associated with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. The cloud providers give detailed billing information, but it is hard for many organizations to get into the weeds of this data and understand it holistically to tie back resources to departments for chargeback purposes. This is where our platform makes a difference for our clients. By ingesting their cost and usage reports, billing information, and metadata, we can expose and analyze that granular information. We also provide anomaly detection, reviewing increases in spending on certain products or processes to optimize resources.
Essentially, we optimize your cloud resources—are they running at the right time, are they properly configured, and are they the right sizes? Providing that granular cost data helps you understand your bill and make data-driven decisions on what is best for your organization.
Makaryan: Can you describe the technology that powers your SaaS platform?
Fitrakis: We provide a SaaS platform that tells you what your company is spending on and how much. Our three products—Vega Inform, Vega Optimize, and Vega Operate—turn an organization’s cloud bills and relevant data into actionable insights and generate custom recommendations on how you can save money on cloud costs. We do this by breaking down the complex information that cloud bills contain and analyzing tagging information, which refers to the metadata that companies assign to their cloud resources.
Obviously, our ability to provide customers with the best insights also relies on the customer properly configuring tags so we can leverage that metadata and allow them to delve deep into their cloud spending reports. We recommend specific tags, like “owner,” “application,” “department,” “environment,” etc. Tagging allows us to filter and break out that information, such as production or development costs. Using those tags, we can quickly present that filtered information in real-time dashboards, helping the customer understand where and how they can optimize their cloud infrastructure.
I cannot stress the importance of tagging enough. The biggest issue a lot of clients have is understanding what is actually in their ecosystem. Lacking the proper controls and tagging strategy means that many organizations may have cloud infrastructure that does not help them understand where costs are coming from and who owns what resources. Coming up with a basic tagging policy makes optimization much easier to achieve.
Makaryan: What is the role of data in your business model?
Fitrakis: Data is our lifeline. For example, we ingest millions of rows from the AWS cost and usage reports daily to run extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes, which combines data from multiple sources into a central repository. This, in turn, allows us to turn it into a readable format that our customers can understand and use for decision-making. The more data we have about a customer’s infrastructure, the better insights we can provide to help them make educated decisions. I think we are somewhat in a better position since we do not deal with sensitive data, such as payment information, but our entire mission and platform relies on good data to produce good insights.
Makaryan: What is Vega Cloud’s vision for the future?
Fitrakis: The cloud ecosystem changes daily, and we must adapt to help organizations reduce their cloud costs. When AWS started, there were only 10 core services; now, there are over 200. This requires us to constantly expand our expertise to understand new services that cloud providers are putting in place and the infrastructure behind these services. Another area where we are taking steps is AI. We are starting to leverage machine learning and AI on our backend to make analysis smoother and swifter, although I cannot provide detailed roadmap details at the moment.
