How Tenacity Makes Reducing Cloud Waste Part of Your Routine

Jason Yaeger
April 19, 2022
5 min read
Tenacity automatically and instantly identifies underutilized or abandoned resources inside your cloud environment, helping to identify waste in real time. Here's a look at how we do it...

When it comes to reducing public cloud waste or unused cloud assets, AWS doesn’t always present your options in a clear and effective way… and it’s not in their best interest to. Sure, they offer you options to reduce spend through utilizing savings plans or reserved instances. However, choosing either option is actually skewed towards AWS making more money in the long run. (Just one of the many reasons why cybersecurity is needlessly complicated on purpose.)

That’s why Tenacity has made it our mission to democratize the cloud - including helping you identify where you’re spending money, where you’re wasting money, how much you’re spending in different regions, and what underutilized resources are flying under your radar, racking up both spend and compute power. Here’s how we do it…

Spending Analysis

One thing that Tenacity does that is unlike anyone else is we automatically and instantly identify underutilized or abandoned resources inside your cloud environment, helping to identify waste in real time.

When you click into your Tenacity cost savings portal, we call out things like underutilized or abandoned load balancers in your specific environment. What that actually means is “this item is performing below the usage requirements.” We also provide you with the contextual information you need for each resource so you can decide whether or not you are going to use it, right-size it, or get rid of it. Unfortunately, this kind of decision making is nearly impossible in AWS’s current tool because it’s difficult to find out where unused load balancers are located if you have an environment of any meaningful size, or even what account that resource might live within. 

With Tenacity, this information is accessible in just a couple clicks - you open up your Savings Analysis, select one of the problem resources identified at the top of your prioritized list, and click into that resource to learn what needs to be checked and which account it can be found in. This right here drastically simplifies your engineers’ task, as they no longer have to go open up AWS, find the right account, find the dashboard, find the resource, see what's actually running through it, and make a determination. We've just done that for you… even down to doing the math that helps you see how much money you can save just by changing the size from 3X to XL.

Global Insights

These days, many organizations have dedicated FinOps teams who are wholly dedicated to optimizing the cloud. This includes asking questions like, “Are we optimized? How much are we spending in different regions? Is there a cost performance trade off that needs to be made based on location, cost, and optimization?

With Tenacity’s Global Insights map, we put the visual answer to how much you are spending in different regions right in front of you. Quickly see which resources you have spun up in Germany vs. South America East. Look at the balance of where your assets are deployed in real time, so you can begin understanding your cost differentials and deployment strategy. Not only does this visual map view give you a better understanding of what you are spending and where you could be saving, but it also helps you understand how optimized your cloud footprint is by seeing where your assets live across the globe, and where you may have a heavy concentration of assets that could be better optimized. 

Plus, these maps were designed with user experience and understanding at the core, so you no longer have to wait for someone to help you gather the data and locate the assets. With Tenacity, all of your global resources are just a click away. 

Untagged Resource

A properly tagged cloud environment is a must - not just for quickly being able to sort and identify your resources within different accounts or departments, but also because the strategy of ‘zero untagged resources’ helps you easily alert to abandoned or unattached resources that may be running rouge in the background.

Tenacity allows you to easily filter your tags by “untagged” so that you can quickly find resources that are not properly being managed and may be related to IT security, compliance, sprawl, justification, or any other type of filter. By using the Tenacity platform to drive untagged resources down to zero, you will be able to see in real-time when new untagged resources pop up in your environment, so you can monitor them, tag them properly, or decommission them if they are waste. 

Want to see for yourself all of the cloud waste that Tenacity can bring to the surface of your public cloud environment? Click here to Sign Up for a free trial and your cloud data (and unused resources) will begin populating in minutes.

We're really easy to work with!

Integrate with your cloud providers in under 5 minutes
Flat monthly subscription fee
API first, so we integrate with your existing tools
Setup, configuration, and monthly support from our team of cloud spend management experts included