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Cloud Cost Optimization
Imagine the day when your IT and finance teams can easily see how much each cloud resource is costing—and make adjustments on the fly. That’s the goal of Access Point’s Cloud Cost Optimization service: giving your people the clarity, control, and peace of mind they need to manage cloud expenses while also optimizing performance and security. By identifying and eliminating inefficiencies, establishing governance frameworks, and integrating DevOps best practices, we ensure your cloud environment supports both your bottom line and your strategic objectives.
The challenge of rising cloud costs and security gaps
Your business relies on the scalability and flexibility of cloud platforms. However, on-demand capacity, sprawling services, overlooked consumption, and insufficient security controls can cause costs—and risks—to soar. Many organizations lack clear visibility into their usage and have no unified frameworks to handle resource allocation, performance optimization, or continuous security monitoring.
Unpredictable or unmonitored usage
In multi-team environments, resources are often left running after hours, virtual machines remain underutilized, and development environments are forgotten altogether. These oversights add up—driving costs without delivering proportional value or maintaining necessary security oversight.
Inadequate governance and cost management practices
While the cloud offers endless configuration options, many businesses lack strong governance or real-time monitoring to manage them. As a result, budget overruns become routine, performance can suffer, and accountability is limited. At the same time, opportunities to integrate security and compliance into daily operations are often missed.
Evolving security threats in DevOps
Rapid development cycles often push security to the sidelines, leading to misconfigured services and vulnerabilities that slip into production. Without a DevSecOps strategy in place, organizations risk exposing sensitive data or failing to meet regulatory requirements—especially when security reviews occur too late in the development pipeline.
Actionable approaches from Access Point Consulting
Access Point Consulting focuses on a proactive, data-driven strategy to optimize cloud spending and enhance security—without sacrificing performance or innovation. We integrate cost dashboards, governance frameworks, DevOps security best practices, and well-architected approaches that help businesses understand and reduce expenses while strengthening their cloud posture in real time.
Reduce cloud costs by identifying inefficiencies and over-provisioned resources
We begin by implementing centralized dashboards that give IT, finance, and business leaders a clear view of resource allocation, usage trends, and associated costs. This transparency enables rapid decisions that cut waste. Next, we analyze workload metrics such as CPU, memory, and storage utilization to identify over-provisioned or idle resources—then deploy policies to shut down unused development environments and reassign capacity as needed. To ensure elasticity, we help configure auto-scaling policies that dynamically match infrastructure to demand, so you only pay for what you actually use.
Optimize cloud workloads for performance and security
Performance and protection go hand-in-hand. Our experts use real-time and historical performance data to fine-tune instance types, storage options, and network settings. At the same time, we reinforce security by enforcing encryption standards, optimizing access controls, and configuring IAM policies to align with least-privilege principles—ensuring every optimization maintains or improves your security baseline.
Implement cloud governance frameworks for cost control and security monitoring
To control costs and maintain visibility, we set automated budget alarms at multiple thresholds—80%, 90%, and 100%—with real-time alerts that flag anomalies. We enforce centralized policies such as mandatory resource tagging, naming conventions, and compliance checks across all environments, ensuring consistency and accountability. For deeper control, we deploy policy-as-code frameworks that scan and remediate deviations from regulatory and internal standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or NIST.
Streamline cloud application performance using automation tools
Automation is central to keeping costs and performance in balance. We embed cost optimization checks and security scans directly into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring each deployment aligns with budget and performance goals. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates standardize environment creation and reduce human error, while automated health and performance tools monitor applications in real time—flagging bottlenecks and auto-remediating issues before they affect end users.
Assess cloud provider services for optimal cost-benefit trade-offs
Access Point helps you make the most of provider offerings by evaluating payment models like Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for predictable workloads, Spot Instances for batch jobs or non-critical environments, and Free Tier services for experimental or low-intensity workloads. We also conduct vendor-neutral analysis to compare services across different cloud providers—or different configurations within the same provider—so your decisions are grounded in cost-benefit clarity, not brand loyalty.
What Our Clients Are Saying
The team blended really well together with our team at Jefferson. The Access Point team was always available and provided the right documentation. Overall, working with Access Point was a great experience for me.
Working with Access Point has been a game changer. Their expertise in cybersecurity, coupled with their strategic approach to risk management and ISO 27001 preparation was highly valuable. They provided actionable recommendations and aided our team in implementing measures appropriate to our needs, giving us confidence in our data protection.
The cyber risk to internet-connected organizations is real. Access Point has the knowledge, experience, and expert resources to support my cybersecurity, compliance, and audit needs. They know how to guide organizations through the minefield of cybersecurity, adeptly balancing and prioritizing compliance requirements and right-sized services ensuring the safety and resiliency of my data assets and applications. Access Point is my partner and CISO, and the reason I do not lay awake at night worrying about cybersecurity and compliance.
"Access Point is more than staff augmentation. We don't have someone that we're just assigning tickets to and they’re processing. We have someone who's helping leadership, helping to set strategy, and helping us answer our customers’ questions. When done right, it doesn't have to be an additional management headache.”
Access Point’s expertise in cybersecurity operations is remarkable. They helped establish our robust incident response team and implemented advanced monitoring and detection systems, tailoring solutions to our specific needs.
