Mission Cloud Services, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner, has launch of Mission Control, an AWS-exclusive cloud services platform for data visualization, analytics, and collaboration with the teams supporting its cloud managed services, Mission Cloud Foundation and Mission Cloud One.
Mission CEO Simon Anderson describes Mission Control as a strategic opportunity to draw on Mission’s deep expertise as an established AWS Partner while addressing a growing need in the cloud services market. “When we started Mission five years ago, the market really thought that automation could solve every problem,” Anderson says. “And they were halfway right. Automation has made it possible to make decisions and build businesses faster than ever before. But with AWS comes global scale minutes and over 200 core services. So there’s also complexity. The future of handling that complexity is incredible automation and tools, solving problems as only machines can, but empowered by human ingenuity, creativity, and wisdom.”
A cloud services platform is a new category of cloud platform technology, built to address that complexity by operating at the intersection of cloud management platforms, work management platforms, and managed service providers. By integrating functionality from all three of these solutions, Mission Control has been designed as “a place for collaboration and learning,” not just data visualization or self-serve tooling, says Kris Bernard, VP of Digital Experience at Mission. “What this means practically is that for every insight, alert, or datapoint we visualize, you’ll have access to an expert to help you understand what it means, why it matters, and how to act on it.”
Today Mission Control launches with four major features to deliver these insights:
- Scorecards, its proprietary cost and health check scoring system based on Mission and AWS best practices, which assesses customers’ environments across five major areas: Cost, Operations, Security, Reliability, and Performance.
- Resources, its visibility and monitoring system for examining a customer’s AWS environment with per-resource granular views.
- Recommendations, its guidance forum where Mission analysts catalog and suggest opportunities for efficiency or cost savings and track how those changes, once implemented, improve a customer’s growth.
- Ticketing & Live Chat, where customers can get real-time 24/7 support on their AWS environment for technical troubleshooting and incident management.
Jonathan LaCour, Mission CTO, said, “There are hundreds of tools customers can buy to drive success on AWS,” “But all of them have the same challenge: the output of the tools is useful, but there’s nobody to interpret it for the customer. And even if you adopt tools you’re comfortable with, all of the information lives in different places, which makes it hard to be strategic.” So, Mission Control was designed to integrate these functionalities and pair you with the expertise you need to make the most of them.
By making Mission expertise, contextualization, and person-to-person collaboration the central pillars of Mission Control’s design, LaCour says the typical SaaS product model has been inverted. “It’s not Software as a Service anymore, but Services as a Software. In the old model, you’d have, for example, a software solution like a cloud management platform [CMP] analyze your environment and summarize its findings. But a CMP making a right-sizing recommendation only knows you’re not using all the RAM; it doesn’t know anything about your workloads, goals, or business. In our model, having a human in the loop to understand all these things means we can anticipate needs and not just plot data. With a CMP you get data—with Mission Control you get outcomes.”
