Rethinking data economics with Infrequent Tier data

We hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and taking advantage of the added time at home to spend ample time with your families, picking up new hobbies, workout routines, and staying active! We are in unprecedented times, and as you look around, we are all having to change our ways and adjust to the new normal in our personal and professional lives.

Even on the work front, with the new realities of remote and virtual engagements taking hold, companies are forced to look for new ways to cut costs yet grow business during the crisis. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear more companies are going digital, leveraging SaaS services and remote workforce tools. The Sumo Logic Continuous Intelligence Report 2019 found multi-cloud adoption has grown by 50% since last year. Supporting these cloud infrastructures has become a key priority for CIOs across the globe.

Rethinking data economics

As more businesses go digital, the data generated by their apps and infrastructure -- which is critical for application operations and security -- is growing at astounding rates. The reality is the more volume of data you’re generating, the higher the cost of getting value from it. At a certain point, the economics of analyzing all the data generated by an application in a brute force way just does not work.

For many years, our product and business strategy has been committed to reducing costs for our customers as they use our Continuous Intelligence Platform to derive value from all that data. Today, we are extending our platform capabilities and value with two key innovations -- credit-based licensing and the Infrequent analytics data tier, now generally available to customers. These capabilities will be a further economic benefit for all Sumo Logic customers. These innovations provide limitless choices to maximize value from the analytics platform at high ROI, controlling costs while incrementally benefiting from the organization's growing data.

Cloud Flex Credits

Cloud Flex Credits is a continuation of our multi-year Cloud Flex licensing strategy for maximizing value and flexibility for our customers. With this unique value based licensing model, a customer buys a bucket of credits and can flexibly utilize them throughout the term of the contract based on their use of the platform. Credits are universally available for use across the packaging plans that support all products or capabilities within the Sumo Logic platform. The new licensing model provides:

• Unlimited flexibility - no penalties or overages for going over original estimated data size in the contract
• Unlimited choice - self-service use of products (logs, metrics, SIEM, data tiers, and more), no need to license every product or functionality, let the business demand drive your usage seamlessly
• Unlimited value - eliminate waste by automatically applying credits to only what is being used, and drive cost lower with data tiers.

Cloud Flex Credits is available in four packages tailored for teams with common use cases. In addition to the Essentials package, customers can choose Enterprise Operations if they are primarily interested in operations performance and availability, or Enterprise Security if they are focused on security and compliance use cases. For our high volume customers who seek to adopt the entire Sumo Logic platform, we introduced Enterprise Suite, an all-encompassing package, which provides superior features and capabilities as well as economics by taking advantage of tiered analytics and volume discounts.

On-demand analytics with the Infrequent data tier

For the last few years, Sumo Logic has been enhancing our Continuous Intelligence platform to allow customers to match the license economics with the value they derive from the data they’re analyzing. Continuing this innovation, our latest on-demand analytics offer -- Infrequent Data -- is available today and rounds out our tiered analytics offerings.

Now customers are able to segment their data and tailor the analytics dynamically with three distinct data tiers:

• Continuous - or streaming analytics tier is designed for mission-critical workloads, where you need constant visibility to ensure the real-time and continuous health and security of IT apps and infrastructure. This tier starts at $2.50/GB on the Essentials and $5/GB on the Enterprise Suite package.

• Frequent - interactive analytics tier is designed for high usage ad-hoc analysis such as code deployment, testing, product analysis, and similar use cases. This tier is available in the Enterprise Suite, and costs roughly $2.25/GB

• Infrequent - interactive on-demand analytics tier is designed for low usage ad-hoc analysis of data throughout the year for troubleshooting, security investigations, customer support, and other use cases. The data is securely stored in the Sumo Logic service and is instantly available on-demand for interactive analysis without any additional data preparation, re-ingestion, or rehydration. Customers can immediately activate analytics on-demand and pay accordingly at only 10 cents/GB for data ingest, and $4/TB data analyzed. No longer do you need to depend on logging without analytics rehydration models that take support ticket requests and delays up to days to get data available to analyze.

Bringing it all together - “Limitless” licensing model

Tiered analytics, when combined with the Cloud Flex Credits licensing, delivers unparalleled benefits for customers. With this combination, customers get maximum value, choice, and flexibility required for operating and securing their digital businesses, while still making the economics work within their analytics budgets.

Breaking down legacy licensing models

Today's legacy and siloed monitoring and analytics vendor licensing models force customers to make a trade-off as their machine data grows, either by paying runaway license costs or being forced to discard data to control costs creating blind spots.

Antiquated licensing

The typical responses from legacy vendors to manage costs have been to extend their antiquated licensing models

• Price by CPU-based units, that charges based on the CPU capacity (or memory at times) of the machine processing the data.
• Price by bucket/ties arbitrarily fitting customers within an economic bucket based on their company size.

Logging without analytics

Other vendors have opted to reduce customers' spend by providing cheaper stop-gap data archive options such as logging without analytics, which only stores data but provides no analytics. While these vendors charge 10 cents/GB for mere archiving, we provide it for free. In addition to providing an archiving service, our Continuous Intelligence platform empowers administrators and power users to better manage their usage, data needs and more by enabling a variety of coarse grained or fine grained policies for different use cases, data types, tiered data, departments and more by leveraging the powerful ML and analytics built in to the Sumo service.

Bait and switch

The same vendors also hide the costs of custom metrics, and hook the customers with perceived low price, while in reality, slapping monthly overages on to enterprises and significantly exceeding analytics TCO.

Sumo Logic’s innovative licensing model breaks through these false choices. With our new model, Sumo Logic users now can address all of these limitations, thus resulting in a more predictable investment while extracting maximum value from their analytics solutions.

The Sumo Logic solution is also very transparent -- we deliver a real-time dashboard that shows the credit allocation, credit use by each capability, and credit trends throughout the year. If a customer is on a higher monthly usage trend, customers can instantly recognize the trend, adjust their usage and make the budget work accordingly.

How do I get these solutions? 

At Sumo Logic we are maniacally focused on maximizing value for our customers, making data and analytics more economical for them. We continue to push the boundaries of our innovation and our unique architectural advantages to segment the analytics and licensing to fit each customer that makes the most sense for them, consistently bringing down the costs.

To learn more about these solutions, please contact your Sumo Logic sales rep or signup for our solutions here.