About Armis security

Armis is a leading asset visibility and security company, offering real-time protection to top companies across industries. With their unified asset intelligence platform, Armis provides passive cyber asset management, risk management, and automated enforcement. The system protects companies’ managed and unmanaged assets and IoT devices in the face of ever-increasing threats of cyberattacks. 

Key results

• Teams cost insights - Finout generated cost visibility and increased accountability across the entire organization.
• Countless hours saved -  Saved countless hours on data analysis and custom reports.
• One MegaBill for all cloud expenses - Custom costs feature allows spending across all vendors to be tracked in one place.
• Turned multi -Tenant infrastructure costs into usable spend metrics.
• Unit cost solved - Precise information on the cost per entity, per feature, and more enables better decision-making.

Armis’ FinOps challenge

Armis’ challenge was similar to that of many companies finding themselves in a hyper-growth stage. While they were growing quickly, they were focused on onboarding new customers and meeting their needs putting cost optimization at a lower priority.

Armis is constantly implementing new technologies and replacing core components of their architecture. They needed a way to monitor the cost impact of these new deployments to ensure that they were spending the budget effectively. To further complicate the situation, Armis relies heavily on multi-tenant technologies such as Kubernetes and other databases. Some are provided by AWS, and others are third-party managed services, which makes it challenging to understand the cost per unit of tenants or features. Given the extremely fast growth, decisions had to be made quickly and infrastructure had to be designed without first taking the time to establish a cost-effective scaling plan. 

As the company and product matured It was time to address the escalating costs in a responsible and methodical way. In an effort to address the “low-hanging fruit” and the most accessible problems to solve first, the company tried implementing a number of different tools, but none of them provided the holistic FinOps solution they were looking for.

Why Finout?

For Armis, the choice of Finout came down to one major element: 

In terms of Finout’s capabilities, there were three main issues that were critical for Armis in a FinOps tool:

• Cost visibility - At a most basic level, they wanted a customizable dashboard that was easy and intuitive to use while providing relevant information to each team.
• Granularity - With an assortment of customers and features, the Armis team needed a way to filter the spend data by very specific and granular criteria.
• Customizability - Being able to incorporate custom costs from a wide array of vendors into reports was a non-negotiable.

The Results of Onboarding Finout’s Cloud Observability Platform

Once Armis onboarded Finout, they immediately began to reap the benefits. They now had a clear picture of exactly how much each customer was costing per vendor, per feature, and more. They were able to use this information to make better pricing decisions and optimize their infrastructure. 

Relevant visibility for each team with dashboards

Once the issue of cost was brought to the forefront, there were many different stakeholders with a vested interest in cost information, but each from a slightly different angle.

Armed with accurate and real-time information, there is more cross-collaboration than ever before and everyone is able to make more informed strategic decisions.

Finout’s dashboards save countless hours on both exporting data and meetings regarding what each department wants to see; now any user can get the data they need in minutes.

New levels of granularity with Virtual Tags

The biggest challenge of working with both single and multi-tenant infrastructure is being able to calculate the exact cost per entity of those using the multi-tenant systems. The way to do this is to look at the entire cluster cost and then calculate the percentage used by each customer. This information is extremely important at Armis and is used primarily as part of the internal reporting process. They identify the top 10 most expensive customers and aim to understand what is causing the high costs and how their use can be better optimized to control the costs.

Before Finout and its virtual tagging feature, it would take hours to investigate each customer’s usage, and, even then, it was hard to be sure how accurate the information was. Virtual tags offer the level of granularity that the Armis team needs to understand exactly where costs are coming from and where improvements can be made.

Capturing all costs with custom cost centers

Due to the nature of their work, Armis has contracts with a number of vendors beyond the standard AWS. For them, being able to track the costs of CloudFlare and other solutions that they use regularly is an essential part of their business operations. 

Finout’s custom costs feature allows Armis to monitor their spending across all vendors in one place. No more cross-referencing complicated Excel spreadsheets or trying to splice together disparate data. The full picture of all cloud spend is available at the team’s fingertips whenever they need it.

The Bottom Line

With the adoption of Finout, Armis received everything they were looking for. The team has a much greater grasp of their overall cloud spend, and the ability to understand how much each customer and feature costs. This allows them to optimize their pricing and services, creating a better customer experience and a stronger bottom line.