This growing Fulton startup is helping large orgs get clearer vision in the cloud

Talk about the cloud, and it can seem like it’s all one big thing. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of operations and processes happening to get resources to folks, said cloudtamer.io CEO Brian Price. At larger firms with a number of different departments, often those cloud operations differ from one sector to another.

The Fulton-based company is seeing cloud resources expanding, bringing the need for organizations to set up a framework for how they’ll grow.

“Every organization should have a level of practices and policies that they want to define in how their cloud needs to be used,” Price said.

It’s called cloud governance, and it’s an area in which cloudtamer.io is growing a customer base that started in working with government agencies and is growing into commercial markets.

Price said governance helps to manage access to resources, control budgets for what’s being spent, and automate the work of complying with specific policies and procedures that come with healthcare and cybersecurity concerns in regulated industries.

It’s those features around which the cloudtamer.io team built its platform, bringing a framework that can inform how different departments manage their resources.

“What we try to do is take and map your cloud environment to the way your organization does business,” Price said. “If you have just one team that is responsible for managing the cloud environment, before long that team is not going to scale.”

The company’s platform is designed to set up a process by which folks can request resources and get access, while the organization ensures that it is being done in a way that’s in line with cost and security concerns.

Ultimately they are looking to help companies ensure that as they grow and use more cloud resources, companies can still have a way that cloud resources are easy to manage, ensure that different departments aren’t buying different resources without each other knowing and automating processes.

Another particular area of focus is on protecting against the misconfigurations that can lead to potential security issues. With a new feature rolled out this week called “continuous compliance,” the company is adding features that allow for detection, reporting and remediation of potential policy violations. This feature harnesses open source tool Cloud Custodian, which was developed inside Tysons, Virginia-based Capital One, and is designed to automate functions that are often performed manually. It also allows the checks and scans to be performed across the tools of multiple brands of cloud providers.

When it comes to security and compliance, Price called cloudtamer.io a “single pane of glass” that allows customers to see where they stand and where they need to focus more.

“Now we can focus on how people are using the cloud, not worrying about what they’re doing in the cloud,” Price said.

The company’s origin shows how work with the government can forge a path to developing a product. The platform grew out of technology that was initially developed to solve problems inside professional services firm Stratus Solutions. About two years ago, it formally launched. Then, Stratus spun out cloudtamer.io as its own company. The movement of commercially viable technology to grow out of government services work is one we’ve seen championed in a region that has plenty of talent solving problems that bring new tech tools to large agencies.

As a lifelong Marylander, Price has also found community among technologists around the state, and it is growing a customer base. The company is working with large federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, National Institutes of Health, NASA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and Centers for Disease Control. It’s also expanding into commercial markets with large cloud environments.

The team has grown from 10 in its initial spinout to 40 people, and it’s hiring in engineering roles for DevOps and front-end, as well as cloud architect. Recently, COO John Lynch told us about how they’re continuing to stay connected during WFH during a panel at Technical.ly Introduced | Virtual conference.

Everybody loves a little healthy competition, our tamer team included. Our COO John Lynch talks about how our #WellnessChallenge is inspiring employees to light up our leaderboard in @Technical_ly 's virtual conference.https://t.co/zDKdPSzaUK

— Kion (@kionsoftware) May 28, 2020