Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is IRIE?
IRIE™ stands for Infrastructure Relationship Intelligence Engine. It helps you discover cloud resources, understand how they connect, identify potential waste, and use cost information to make informed decisions.
Back to questions ↑2. How can IRIE help reduce my cloud bill?
IRIE helps uncover resources that may no longer be needed and connects those findings with available cost information. Your team can review the evidence, understand dependencies, and prioritize opportunities to reduce unnecessary spending.
Back to questions ↑3. Why am I paying for resources I am not using?
Cloud resources can remain after projects end, applications change, or temporary environments are retired. Some continue generating charges even when they serve little purpose. IRIE helps bring these overlooked resources to your attention.
Back to questions ↑4. How does IRIE work?
IRIE discovers your resources, analyzes their relationships, and produces findings for review. Infrastructure views and cost analysis help your team understand the findings and decide what to do next.
Back to questions ↑5. What makes IRIE different from a cloud cost dashboard?
A cost dashboard shows where money is going. IRIE adds context about the resources behind that spending and how they connect. This helps your team investigate potential waste with a better understanding of what a change could affect.
Back to questions ↑6. What is Relationship Intelligence?
Relationship Intelligence shows how cloud resources connect and depend on one another. It helps you understand a resource’s role in your environment before deciding whether to keep, change, or remove it.
Back to questions ↑7. What kinds of potential waste can IRIE identify?
IRIE’s analytics evaluate supported resource types for conditions such as unattached storage volumes, unused public IP addresses, unattached network interfaces, and potentially orphaned snapshots. Each finding identifies a condition that deserves review.
Back to questions ↑8. Does a finding mean a resource should be deleted?
No. A finding means a resource needs attention. Your team should review its purpose, relationships, and supporting evidence before taking action. A resource that appears unused may still have a valid business need.
Back to questions ↑9. Does IRIE automatically change or delete resources?
No. IRIE uses read-only access to collect information and support analysis. Your team remains responsible for approving and making changes in your cloud environment.
Back to questions ↑10. How does IRIE connect to my cloud account?
Your team deploys a read-only access role in your cloud account. IRIE uses that role to collect the information needed for its supported features. Your organization controls the permissions and can revoke access.
Back to questions ↑11. Do I need to install software on my servers?
No. IRIE is agentless. It collects information through supported cloud services without installing software on individual servers or workloads.
Back to questions ↑12. Can IRIE help with multiple cloud accounts?
Yes. IRIE supports analysis across multiple accounts while retaining account and region context. This helps teams understand where resources belong and investigate waste across their environment.
Back to questions ↑13. Which cloud providers does IRIE support?
IRIE’s initial focus is AWS. Support for additional cloud providers is planned. Contact Short Hill Corporation to discuss your environment and the coverage you need.
Back to questions ↑14. What is a discovery snapshot?
A discovery snapshot records the resources found during a completed discovery run. It gives IRIE a consistent foundation for analyzing relationships and producing findings tied to that collection.
Back to questions ↑15. Is IRIE a real-time monitoring tool?
IRIE analyzes collected discovery and cost information. Its results reflect those collections, rather than a continuous, live view of every change in your cloud account.
Back to questions ↑16. What can I see with Infrastructure Visibility?
Infrastructure Visibility brings resource inventory, relationships, and findings into connected views. You can explore your environment by account and region, then drill down into individual resources for more detail.
Back to questions ↑17. What does Cost Intelligence provide?
Cost Intelligence helps you review collected spending, explore cost history, and connect available cost evidence with resource findings. This helps your team focus on opportunities with a clearer financial impact.
Back to questions ↑18. Can IRIE tell me exactly how much I will save?
IRIE can help evaluate potential savings where sufficient cost and resource information is available. Actual savings depend on your pricing, commitments, usage, and the changes your team makes.
Back to questions ↑19. What is Disposition management?
Disposition management is a planned feature that will allow teams to place critical findings and associated resources into a review queue, assign them to team members, and manage the next steps.
Back to questions ↑20. Who is IRIE designed for?
IRIE is designed for organizations that need a clearer understanding of their cloud infrastructure and spending. It helps cloud operations, infrastructure, engineering, and finance teams work from shared evidence and context.
Back to questions ↑21. Who develops IRIE?
IRIE is developed by Short Hill Corporation, an information technology consulting company founded in 1992. IRIE combines infrastructure discovery, relationship analysis, analytics, and cost intelligence to support informed cloud decisions.
Back to questions ↑22. How can I learn more or become a Design Partner?
Contact Short Hill Corporation to discuss your environment, review IRIE’s capabilities, and explore becoming a Design Partner. You can use the Contact or Design Partner Program link on this website.
Back to questions ↑23. Why choose IRIE over another cloud analysis tool?
IRIE brings resource discovery, relationships, findings, infrastructure views, and cost analysis into one connected process. Your team can move from identifying a concern to understanding its context and evaluating potential savings.
Back to questions ↑24. How does IRIE help us avoid removing something important?
IRIE helps you examine connected resources before making a change. Instead of relying only on an “unused” label, your team can review dependencies and supporting evidence to make a more informed decision.
Back to questions ↑25. Does IRIE explain why it flagged a resource?
Yes. IRIE findings include supporting evidence so your team can understand why a resource deserves attention. This makes findings easier to investigate, explain to colleagues, and evaluate before acting.
Back to questions ↑26. How does IRIE connect technical findings with financial decisions?
IRIE connects resource findings with available cost information. Technical teams can explain what needs review, while finance teams can understand its spending impact. Together, they can prioritize potential savings with clearer justification.
Back to questions ↑27. How does IRIE help us investigate findings faster?
IRIE brings inventory, relationship context, findings, and cost information together. Your team can drill into a resource and follow its connections, reducing the need to piece together information from separate views.
Back to questions ↑28. Why does IRIE analyze a completed discovery snapshot?
A completed snapshot gives resource and relationship analysis a consistent foundation. Your team can understand which collection produced a finding and review the evidence in that context, even as the live environment changes.
Back to questions ↑29. Do we have to give IRIE control over our infrastructure?
No. Your organization deploys and controls IRIE’s read-only access. IRIE provides information for review, while your team retains authority over resource changes. This supports cost optimization without handing over operational control.
Back to questions ↑30. Can IRIE help different teams agree on what to do?
Yes. IRIE gives teams a shared basis for discussion: the resource, its relationships, the reason it was flagged, and available cost evidence. This helps engineering, operations, and finance evaluate the same opportunity with a clearer understanding of its impact.
Back to questions ↑31. Is IRIE focused only on lowering costs?
IRIE also helps you understand what exists in your cloud and how it fits together. That infrastructure context supports better cost decisions and helps teams identify resources that need further investigation.
Back to questions ↑32. How will IRIE help turn findings into follow-up work?
The planned Disposition management feature will let teams queue critical findings and assign associated resources to team members for review. This will connect analysis with accountable follow-up, helping teams manage what happens next.
Back to questions ↑Need more information?
Our team is here to help. Contact us to learn more about IRIE™, our solutions, or the Design Partner Program.