Integrated Media Technologies, Inc (IMT), was contacted by a Large California Non-Profit Organization to audit their AWS account. The company was concerned around the sudden growth in AWS charges and the improper use of new services without the appropriate consent from management. The customer endeavored to discover the rapid bill growth, but due to the sheer amount of AWS billing data and the sensitive nature of the charges, they recognized the need to bring in an expert.
IMT started the engagement through meeting with various stakeholders about their understanding of what services should be used, the expected load, and defining the issues they were trying to solve. After this information was captured and clearly defined, this data would serve as the benchmark for all account discovery actions.
After the stakeholder interviews concluded, IMT reviewed the company’s AWS billing. IMT built several cost and service use dashboards in order to track expense growth trends over the past year. The results highlighted a logarithmic increase in costs in the recent months from the usual suspects – S3, EC2, RDS and egress. However, it also highlighted that several new services had been recently brought online contributing to some of the rapid growth in AWS charges. Armed with this information IMT was able focus on specific services comparing their use to the stories from the stakeholders and generate a comprehensive report.
While the contents of the report are proprietary and confidential, IMT was able to highlight a few AWS best practices. For example:
1. The root account should only be used to delegate control to IAM accounts. All account activity should be done via an IAM account.
2. Enable and enforce the use of two-factor authentication.
3. Set up billing alert parameters. Implementing a monthly budget with email alerts if the estimated total would exceed their budget.
4. Enable AWS CloudTrail to capture all API events creating a clear audit trail.
5. Scale only when the demand for more resources becomes necessary.
After the findings were presented to the customer and the required changes were implemented, IMT was able to work with AWS to secure several thousand dollars in AWS credits for the company to recover the charges.
About Integrated Media Technologies, Inc.
Integrated Media Technologies Inc. (IMT) is a leading technology solutions and managed services provider focused on partnering with our clients to achieve their strategic initiatives. IMT provides a full project lifecycle of consulting, design, implementation, and ongoing support to meet the growing demands of our customers, partners, and employees. From our inception in 2007, IMT’s mission has been to simplify the IT industry into economic drivers to realize greater ROI and new efficiencies through integrating leading media, storage, collaboration, security, and cloud technologies. With offices in offices in Los Angeles, Boston, and New York, IMT services a wide variety of businesses in diverse industries with the same goal in mind: building long term, trusted relationships with our customers by delivering the highest value and most efficient technology solutions to achieve optimum business outcomes.
