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Wondering Why Your Cloud Bill is so High this Month?

Numrah Irfan, VP, Client Success

June 22, 2022

I am the VP of Client Success at WatServ. It’s a wide-ranging role, but one of the most critical areas I focus on is the connection between our teams and our clients. Are the services all running smoothly and are our clients getting the best from our services and solutions?

One of the questions I have often been asked is around the cost of a cloud platform. Why isn’t it the same amount every month and how can sudden increases be explained?

This can be a challenge to explain for some service companies. They sign a contract and then start applying all those extra charges that were buried on page 94 of the contract. WatServ takes a completely different approach, and it makes my job far easier – we are transparent about how costs have been calculated so everything is always clear.

But more importantly, we work actively with clients to remove the mystery of billing and to help them reduce their bills.

This might not sound like a great strategy – who wants their clients to pay less? However, our experience is that by building a strong relationship with clients who know that we are transparent on costs and can see that we actively advise them on how to manage their cloud platform more efficiently, we can build a closer long-term relationship. When someone has your back, you stay with them.

A CTO (or also CFO) knows that a cloud platform that is highly flexible, scalable, and with variable pricing depending on users, will have a different cost each month. Our team ensures that each bill is explained and then we look out for patterns of use and how the client could plan more effectively in future.

This is especially true for ongoing and recurring costs:

  • Reviewing the right amount of back up storage
  • Working together to shift costs between Capex and Opex
  • Managing credits so bills can be smoothed across a year
  • Reviewing governance and policies to create more efficiency
  • Right sizing correctly so the client is not paying for anything they don’t need

This is all a standard feature of the culture at WatServ. Our success is dependent on the success of our clients. Client success is literally in my job title. I know that contract and billing transparency and advice on cloud efficiency is unusual for many service providers, but that’s why I usually have only positive conversations with our clients.

If you are looking at your own cloud bills this month and wondering how that $5,000 charge suddenly became $7,500 without any explanation, then get in touch. Maybe you need a partner that will more actively work in your interest!

What do you think? If you have any questions, then please feel free to get in touch via my LinkedIn.

About

WatServ is an IT solutions provider that helps organizations digitally transform through cloud technologies and managed services.

Serving clients as a trusted advisor since 2006, WatServ provides experience-tested, strategic solutions across all stages of the digital transformation journey. Clients choose WatServ to migrate infrastructure and applications to the cloud, secure critical data, implement disaster recovery, deploy virtual desktop, enable data-readiness for productivity solutions and manage IT environments.

Our clients span a broad range of industries, and we’re a global supplier of IT services for many Brookfield Portfolio Companies. To help our mid-size clients, we provide scalable offerings that simplify cloud adoption and drive business optimization. For enterprise clients, we co-create cloud solutions that enable stability and efficiency for complex IT tools and processes.

With more than 15 years of experience, WatServ has a track record of delivering quantifiable business results and a superior client experience. Ranked as one of Canada’s Top 100 Solution Providers for the last three years in a row, WatServ is always on.

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