AHEAD Announces New Managed Cloud Service, CoPilot for AWS, at Re:Invent 2017

This article originally appeared on Business Wire.

AHEAD, a leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions, announced today the release of its new managed service, CoPilot, which will monitor and optimize public cloud environments. The company officially unveiled CoPilot at AWS re:Invent 2017, as AWS will be the initial focus of the service (AHEAD is exhibiting at Booth #2122).

While there is incredible momentum around public cloud adoption, enterprises often find that the combination of enthusiasm and lack of qualified staff lead to unintended negative consequences. These include spikes in billings from new resources being deployed across their businesses and configuration missteps that can leave companies exposed to potential data breaches.

The CoPilot service delivers reports, dashboards, alerts and benchmarks, and integrates them with guidance from AHEAD cloud experts to provide actionable insights in three areas:

• Cost: controlling expenses across all public cloud accounts through analytics and cost projection analysis, alerts, and consolidated billing.
• Inventory: analyzing usage and provisioned resources, as well as daily configuration and environment reporting, to ensure accurate allotment of cloud resources.
• Security: performing 100-plus checks against CIS benchmarks and providing alerts for faster detection and remediation of security, compliance, and malware issues, including those related to PCI and HIPAA.

Underpinning the CoPilot service are industry-leading tools, some to monitor billing, inventory, security and compliance, and others to integrate those insights with ServiceNow for incident management and Slack for ChatOps engagement with the AHEAD team.

“Most of our clients believe in the business potential of the public cloud, but those who’ve taken the leap can be surprised at the added tools required to optimize it for enterprise consumption,” said Eric Kaplan, AHEAD CTO. “Infrastructure teams are often stretched thin just supporting day-to-day operations, and can’t find the time to constantly evaluate, configure, tune, or troubleshoot their public cloud resources. CoPilot alleviates that pressure.”

AHEAD CoPilot is more than integrated tooling—it’s access to experience. The service includes a steady cadence of structured interactions with the AHEAD team to provide remediation guidance. CoPilot also includes a monthly pool of flexible enablement hours to be used for a variety of on-demand needs, ranging from reserved instance analysis, to tagging, to the creation of configuration rules.

CoPilot pricing is a simple function of a client’s monthly AWS billings. As an organization’s spending on AWS grows, the CoPilot fees decrease as a percent of those billings, while the enablement hours included in the service increase.

“We’ve invested extensively in building out our public cloud offerings, with services that guide strategy and adoption, migrate applications at scale, to now providing ongoing optimization,” said Daniel Adamany, AHEAD CEO. “But the public cloud is just one key ingredient in an overall enterprise cloud strategy. AHEAD grew up in the data center, meaning we’re uniquely positioned to help companies bridge their on-premises and public cloud infrastructures in ways that make the most sense for their businesses.”

CoPilot is just one of a recent series of public cloud investments made by AHEAD, including the opening of a Cloud Innovation Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., and an expanded alliance with Equinix, a leading provider of on-ramp capabilities for the public cloud.