How to Optimize AWS Cost Intelligence and Security Compliance with Kalos by Stratus10

By Sujit Singh, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Oscar Moncada, CEO & Co-Founder – Stratus10

Stratus10

AWS empowers businesses to drive innovation and growth by providing the broadest and deepest set of cloud capabilities. Navigating AWS cloud management offers exciting opportunities to optimize cost efficiency while maintaining robust security compliance. With the rapid growth of cloud adoption and investments, the cloud cost management and security industries are thriving, empowering businesses to innovate and scale with confidence.

In this post, we explore industry trends in cloud management, the challenges customers face, and how Stratus10’s Kalos Solution effectively addresses these issues.

Stratus10 is an AWS Specialization Partner and AWS Marketplace Seller that enables customers to take advantage of what AWS has to offer and accelerate their journey to the cloud.

Industry Trends in Cloud Cost and Security Management

For the third year in a row, cost management surpassed security as the primary concern for businesses. According to Flexera’s State of the Cloud Report (2025), 84% of companies identify cloud cost management and 77% of companies identify security as key challenges. Seventy-five percent reported other top issues include cloud governance, managing software licenses, and a lack of resources/expertise.

Given these challenges, it’s not surprising the Flexera research reports organizations’ top initiatives as optimizing existing use of the cloud (cost savings), migrating more workloads to the cloud, and establishing better financial reporting on cloud costs.

The 2025 State of Cloud Report by Rackspace highlights companies are keeping pace with technological innovation by accelerating cloud adoption, optimizing cloud workloads, and integrating AI. In fact, Rackspace reports that 84% of organizations are integrating AI into their cloud strategies to enhance efficiency, analytics, and security.

However, challenges persist that hinder progress – cost overruns, integration struggles, and talent shortages – but solutions like cloud management services augment internal capacity, helping to overcome these barriers. Rackspace reports that nearly half of businesses surveyed employ cloud management services and 45% use cloud cost tools to manage their cloud resources. For what’s driving cloud strategy changes, respondents cite their top business demands as integrating cloud solutions with AI, needing greater flexibility, and reducing IT costs – with 51% showing that these factors will affect their choices around cloud solutions in the next 12-24 months.

Cloud Management Challenges: Cost, Security, & Performance Monitoring

AWS offers businesses unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and an extensive range of services. Effective AWS cloud management unlocks the potential for optimizing cost efficiency, while maintaining stringent security and compliance requirements.

Despite increased spending on SaaS and cloud services, companies continue to grapple with core areas of cloud management.

• Cost: Without proper visibility into how resources are being used, organizations face unexpected spikes in cloud costs. Many companies lack the resources to break down cloud expenses effectively and take action to address cost outliers.
• Security and Compliance: Compliance with security standards and risk mitigation is challenging due to ever-evolving threats and regulations. While AWS Well-Architected best practices and the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark offer a strong foundation, many companies face industry-specific requirements, where additional tools can simplify compliance management.
• Performance: To maintain consistent application performance, organizations must actively monitor their systems. Without proper oversight, they risk encountering bottlenecks that can lead to poor user experiences and reduced responsiveness.

Kalos by Stratus10: Simplifying Cloud Management with Intelligence and Automation

Recognizing industry needs and priorities around cloud management, Stratus10, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, developed Kalos, a SaaS service that provides comprehensive cost visibility, security compliance oversight, and AI-powered recommendations. Kalos meets customer demands for a cost and security management tool with AI that handles the time-consuming heavy lifting of identifying optimization opportunities.

Under the Hood: AWS Services Used in Kalos

Kalos Microservices:

Kalos microservices run on HAQM Elastic Container Service (ECS) using AWS Fargate. There are two sets of microservices deployed in Kalos. One processes AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR) data and HAQM CloudWatch metrics. These microservices transform AWS CUR data into actionable cost insights and aggregate HAQM CloudWatch metrics for performance monitoring. The other set of microservices powers the Kalos Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) components, dynamically scaling resources based on user demand to provide personalized recommendations. Additionally, Kalos maximizes cost efficiencies by using the Fargate Spot capability for interruption-tolerant ECS tasks.

Data Management:

AWS Glue is used in Kalos to perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations, converting AWS CUR data and CloudWatch metrics into a query-ready parquet format. Using parquet format significantly reduces Athena query costs and HAQM Simple Storage Service (S3) usage, delivering low-latency and cost-effective analytics to users. HAQM Athena enables direct, serverless querying of the data in HAQM S3, avoiding database management overhead. By integrating HAQM Athena with AWS Glue, data is pre-processed, indexed, and optimized for ad-hoc SQL-based queries, enabling analysis of usage trends, log data, and API performance instantly.

User Management:

Kalos utilizes HAQM Cognito‘s various capabilities, including secure sign-in, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and session management for user management.

Security:

Kalos leverages HAQM GuardDuty to continuously monitor AWS CloudTrail, HAQM Virtual Private Cloud Flow Logs, and HAQM Route 53 DNS logs to detect security threats. Anomaly detection and automated alerts built into Kalos support security at scale.

Generative AI Capabilities:

KAI, the generative AI application within Kalos, leverages HAQM Bedrock, a fully managed AWS service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies to deliver intelligent data analysis and personalized recommendations to the users.

By thoughtfully integrating different AWS services, Kalos infrastructure is optimized for performance and cost-efficiency, making sure that customers receive a robust and economical solution tailored to their needs.

Key Benefits of Managing AWS Environments with Kalos

Kalos streamlines cloud operations for engineering teams by aggregating data across multiple accounts, providing deeper insights into costs, maintaining compliance against industry frameworks, and delivering optimization recommendations. Here’s how Kalos users access critical information about their AWS environments:

Data Aggregation and Visualization

Kalos consolidates AWS data, including cost, security, resource metrics, and infrastructure metadata, across multiple accounts to provide unified visibility.

Figure 1 shows the Overview Dashboard for aggregated cost and security data from multiple AWS accounts.

Cost Breakdown and Optimization

Cloud cost management extends beyond mere expense tracking. It is about understanding how to optimize spending and performance across your accounts or organizations. Kalos breaks costs down by metrics, such as:

• Spend Type: Track how each spend type (reservations, spot, on-demand) is being utilized to minimize your costs.
• Service: Identify AWS services consuming the most resources and budget.
• Network Data Visibility: Get visibility into data transfer costs, an often-overlooked area where expenses can quickly add up.

Comprehensive Security Compliance Monitoring

Keeping up with security requirements for industry-specific compliance frameworks and assessing risk remediation can be challenging and expensive. Kalos simplifies this by supporting 15 standards, including SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, CIS, NIST, ISO, and FedRAMP.

The solution’s risk impact analysis visualizes how vulnerabilities affect compliance scores. Rather than providing lengthy lists of risks, Kalos correlates each issue to the impacted compliance framework(s), prioritizing risk remediation for engineers and speeding up progress toward compliance goals.

Figure 2 shows the Kalos security dashboard with scores over time, compliance by account, and impact analysis by framework.

FinOps-Friendly Dashboards for Organization-Wide Access

Making complex cloud data accessible and actionable across an organization is essential in the adoption of FinOps practices. Kalos’ straightforward dashboards make sure that not only cloud engineers, but also finance teams, security officers, and C-level executives understand and benefit from the data provided.

Figure 3 shows a detailed billing summary of AWS costs.

Kalos AI (KAI), an Intelligent Generative AI Assistant

KAI within Kalos streamlines access to crucial data, delivering tailored recommendations for cost efficiency, security, and performance. You can use natural language to ask questions and it provides you answers with actionable insights to improve cloud spend and security.

Figure 4 shows cost-saving recommendations from KAI, including rightsizing EC2 instances, using RDS Reserved Instances, optimizing HAQM CloudFront settings for lower data transfer costs, and considering Field Level Encryption. The user also inquires about monthly data transfer fees to understand total costs and identify the account with the highest fees.

KAI analyzes your infrastructure’s data to provide tailored spend and security recommendations, offering predictive insights beyond generic suggestions.

Figure 5 shows KAI recommendations for purchasing Reserved Instances.

Conclusion

This post explains Kalos by Stratus10‘s comprehensive solution for AWS environment optimization, including data aggregation, cost analysis, security, and AI-powered insights.

Ready to take control of your AWS costs and security compliance? Procure Kalos via the AWS Marketplace or try a Kalos free trial to experience how straightforward cloud management can be. For more information or to get a demo, contact us today.
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