Listen to this podcast session with David Schmidtknecht, Co-Founder, Keith Johnson, Co-Founder and Theresa Backus Dunn, Director of Marketing, at cBEYONData, to learn about utilizing CFO Control Tower and AWS to modernize your organization’s financial processes.
Speaker 1: On behalf of AWS and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast session for our AWS federal podcast series. Take it away.
Theresa Backus Dunn: Hello and welcome to modernizing federal financial budget and spend analytics podcast. My name is Theresa Backus Dunn, Director of Marketing at cBEYONData. Joining me today is David Schmidtknecht and Keith Johnson, two of the founders of cBEYONData to discuss utilizing CFO Control Tower and AWS to modernize your financial processes. Let's begin with Dave. Why are cBEYONData customers choosing to modernize their financial systems?
David Schmidtknecht: Well, Teresa, there's a couple of different reasons why now is a great time to modernize first new and available technologies. During the past five years or so, there have been so many new technologies that CFO shops can utilize to automate many of their manual processes, which will support modernizing their systems. A great example is robotic process automation are people known as RPA. We have a customer that has already saved 1000s of people hours by implementing RPA automations. Second, agencies are required to meet multiple new laws and financial accountability and transparency. For example, the never ending changes within the data act. So having an integrated solution that enables these types of capabilities allows customers to prepare these reports or files in hours, not days, their data accuracy is greatly increased, and they reduce the number of hours spent to mainly create these data sets. One of our customers, they recently reduced their ci test submission process from four days to less than three hours. And finally, today's environments. These are faster, less costly implementations. Implementing a SaaS solution that meets 70 to 80% of the requirements right out of the box enables customers to start utilizing the solutions in two to three months, versus building this from scratch, which traditionally would take years to implement.
Theresa Backus Dunn: Thanks, Dave. Keith, are your federal customers moving these types of solutions to the cloud?
Keith Johnson: Yesterday, so a number of our federal customers are moving these types of systems to a FedRAMP cloud platform, such as AWS, they are either purchasing a software as a service solution or expanding their existing cloud deployment footprint. Cloud computing offers customers added flexibility, security, cost savings, reduction in capital expenditure, and inherently fault tolerance to name just a few of the advantages.
Theresa Backus Dunn: So in moving to the cloud, Keith, are there any security considerations that need to be addressed?
Keith Johnson: Great question, Theresa, in moving to the cloud, it doesn't get you a free pass on security, I'm sorry to say, you will still need to work with your agency's information security officer and going through the ETL process to ensure compliance. However, leveraging FedRAMP clouds, platforms or service or software as a service offerings will definitely jumpstart your ETL process in addressing the individual NIST 800 dash 53 controls.
Theresa Backus Dunn: Return on Investment or ROI is critical to companies Dave, what advantages are your customers realizing by modernizing?
David Schmidtknecht: So there are a number of advantages our customers are seeing to include the most important data accuracy in the CFO shop that means generally a clean audit number one priority. By integrating all data from their financial systems, internal financials and external federal systems, our customers are seeing their data accuracy is consistently improving. Much of this is due to the reduction of these one off desktop cuff type systems that attempt to combine pieces and parts of data from multiple systems or reports. Most often these are done at a snapshot point in time, which often results in different people reporting on the same items, but with different numbers. Second, our customers are seeing real time integrated data and insights. So they often have their data updated in near real time, so their analytics are not lagging from their source systems data. As noted before they're taking advantage of new technologies. Utilizing machine learning and predictive analytics, our customers can automatically forecast items such as unspent obligations or payroll over or under burn All of these things lead to a reduction and things like contractor expenses as manual processes move to machine based automated processes. This allows employees to focus on higher value work streams, and eliminates the need for people to perform manual low value tasks.
Theresa Backus Dunn: Keith, tell our listeners, what is the number one reason for moving to the cloud?
Keith Johnson: Well, as I previously mentioned, there are a number of advantages of moving to the cloud. But I believe the biggest reason for customers moving to the cloud is flexibility. Customers have the ability to provision or decommission resources more easily without large upfront expenditures. This means you can stand up and test a number of different architectures and then tear it down until you find the one that addresses your needs. In addition, having the ability to incorporate it, dynamic scaling of your solution based on utilization rather than purchasing infrastructure based on the anticipated maximum load, or simply being able to shut down not decommission test environments, when there aren't in use and saving the money on the compute resources. Infrastructure is no longer a costly or limiting factor when leveraging the cloud.
Theresa Backus Dunn: So Dave, are you telling me it is truly possible to have a single solution that integrates budget formulation, budget execution, external reporting and internal analysis all in a single solution?
David Schmidtknecht: Yes, Theresa. So that's exactly what our CFO Control Tower and budget and spend management solution does is a single integrated platform, which includes a central portal for all users to go to launch their applications and analytics, a central consolidated and secure database that stores budget formulation, spend plan data, and all of your budget execution data. These tools combined with an open reporting architecture, allows users to easily consume all of their budget and spend data in a single secured location.
Theresa Backus Dunn: Keith, what is a typical time frame and level of effort to migrate to the cloud?
Keith Johnson: Well, Theresa. There are a number of factors that go into trying to determine the timeframe and level of effort in migrating to the cloud. These factors include training, so has your staff been trained? Or is going through training on the cloud technology? Or will you be leveraging outside assistance for the first couple of projects in mentoring your team? Then there's the what? What will you be moving to the cloud, an application, a set of servers or back office infrastructure? And lastly, the How do you do a lift and shift the solution as is? Or do you try to re architect the solution when moving to the cloud? My past experience with these types of projects, initially says keep it simple, lift and shift the solution to the cloud platform first. And once in the cloud platform, then you have your team review the architecture and solution to see how to make it more flexible, and to take advantage of the serverless computing services that the cloud platforms offer.
Theresa Backus Dunn: Dave, what are companies procuring these types of solutions and what are some of the contract vehicles available to buy from?
David Schmidtknecht: Good question. So our solution is available via GSA schedule, NASA SEWP, and multiple agencies specific IDIQ contracts. Our solution can be purchased as a software by or software as a service. However, I must say almost all of our new customers are buying the solution as a service in the cloud. This enables them to quickly implement the solution and pay for it as you go utilizing your operational funds. And this doesn't require any large upfront budget for capital investment.
Theresa Backus Dunn: Well, thank you both for your time today and to the audience for listening to our podcast. For more information, check out cBEYONData website at www.cbeyondata.com. Now back to the Carahsoft team.
Speaker 1: Thank you everyone for listening. If you would like more information on how Carahsoft or AWS can assist you, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at aws@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.