Editor’s note: Today, ControlMonkey announced its global expansion and the close of our seed round. You can read all about it here. Below, our CEO shares where we—and the entire cloud industry—are headed next, and, more importantly, why.
So, let’s say you’re a cloud leader (most of our readers are). Tomorrow, when you go into the office, you’ll be greeted by tickets from the R&D team requesting infrastructure changes they need; an urgent email from your CISO about a security vulnerability you need to fix this week…or today; and someone changed a cloud resource–the load balancer, for example–so you’ll have to go back to the previous configuration, but have no idea how. And on top of all that, you’ll get an email from your CTO asking for the timeline to provision a new project in a new cloud region.
3, 2, 1…🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
As a cloud leader, I’ve lived this day many, many times. It’s not pretty. We all want to work differently— smarter, faster, more strategically and proactively. IaC and automation were supposed to save us, but their promise was never fulfilled. Why?
Because the industry has been doing it all wrong.
We all understand IaC is the right way to deliver infrastructure in a safe, secure way. But, to put it bluntly, most of today’s IaC automation solutions aren’t solutions at all. They’re point tools that solve just one of the many problems we face every day. And solving 10% of your cloud problem isn’t solving it at all—a lesson we re-learn every time we scale infra.
For a while, any new automation tool felt like progress. Just a few years ago, most cloud leaders wondered if they needed a Terraform automation tool at all. Nobody is asking that anymore. Now, everyone is asking: which automation option is the most powerful, and how can I get it to work for me?
ControlMonkey makes answering that question very, very easy. I never really bought into the idea that point solutions were a good answer for cloud automation. Like you, I always needed something more holistic—something that actually changed how we work, end-to-end—so, in 2022, my co-founder and I started building it.
That’s why, today, ControlMonkey is the first fully-featured cloud automation platform that connects your git repositories and IaC to your actual cloud configuration. The end-to-end nature of our platform leapfrogs the point-solution tools era of IaC automation to offer a new, far more advanced vision for what ground-up, full automation can be. And it all starts with maximizing control. We call this approach “Total Cloud Control.”
We expect Total Cloud Control to be the cloud automation standard for at least the next twenty years. And this era has a few qualities that separate it from what came before–new ideas and products that, thankfully, really will transform your day, including:
- Deterministic AI that automatically generates Terraform code for existing cloud environments to achieve 100% IaC coverage
- Remediation engines that constantly scans your cloud and IaC code and fixes problems like drift, security vulnerabilities and cost inefficiencies to keep your cloud always-optimized
- Self-service quality gates that shift left security and organizational policies with a catalog of predefined blueprints, so teams can launch new, compliant environments in minutes
- Disaster recovery solutions that capture a daily snapshot of cloud configurations to quickly restore to any point in time
- 100% Cloud vs. Code Integrity, with asset inventory, deviation verification, and click-ops scanning
Add all this up, and you can win more than a 30% increase in your and your team’s productivity, a 3X boost in deployment speed, and 100% cloud configuration back-up. Not bad at all. The only question left is, what does a cloud leader’s day look like when you have Total Cloud Control powered by Control Monkey?
You go to the office: everything in your cloud is exactly where it should be: the right configuration, zero deviations, backed-up on a daily basis. You’ve got no emails from other teams about infrastructure provisioning, because they can do it themselves. There are no urgent emails about cost overruns or security vulnerabilities, because they’ve been addressed automatically. Meanwhile, AI-powered engines continuously search for and remediate drift; provide instant feedback for any suggested change to your cloud; and proactively identify optimizations you can approve with a single click. The best part is, you’ve got 30% more time to think strategically and proactively, and move the business forward. (Plus, you’ll sleep better at night.)
Sounds great, right? Right, because you’ve regained control of your cloud.
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, said something that resonated with me: “There’s no compression algorithm for experience.” As a second-time founder, I’m confident the Total Cloud Control Era—a future that customers like Square, NetApp and Comcast are already living in—is the new standard for cloud automation, today and for the next twenty years. It exists only because of the exceptional ControlMonkey team that, collectively, has more than four decades of experience in our industry, and their unmatched commitment to creating a better industry for you, and for cloud leaders everywhere. I congratulate them on today’s milestone, everything we’ve done together, and all we’ll do in the future, with you.
Ready to change your tomorrow, today? ControlMonkey is how.
