About Cyderes

Cyderes is a global managed cybersecurity services provider, covering the full range of security work: managed detection and response, identity and access management, AI-driven context enrichment, penetration testing, staff augmentation, SOC-as-a-service, and SIEM management. In December 2025, Cyderes acquired Lucidum, a security data fabric startup. The acquisition combined Lucidum's cloud footprint and its Archera relationship into a much larger, multi-cloud environment spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The Problem

At Lucidum, Jeremy managed cloud costs alone, for a company of fewer than 10 employees running primarily on AWS. The workloads didn't fit the traditional reserved-instance mold: proof-of-value engagements for customers that might run 30, 60, or 90 days, and dev and engineering environments that grew and shrank without warning. Committing to a one- or three-year reserved instance meant locking into a specific instance type with no flexibility, a bad bet for a company that had no idea what its infrastructure would look like a year out. Spot instances were unreliable. That left on-demand pricing as the default, and the premium that comes with it.

Why Archera

Archera came recommended by Lucidum's AWS partner rep, who was looking for a way to get Jeremy better pricing outside AWS's standard brackets for companies Lucidum's size. Jeremy was skeptical from the start. By his own account, he pressure-tested nearly every call, asking what the catch was on Archera's 30-day Guaranteed Reserved Instances and buyback guarantees.

The flexibility answered the exact problem reserved instances couldn't solve: Archera let Lucidum commit to capacity without losing the ability to change instance types, scale down, or exit if plans shifted.

The Results

Jeremy tracked the savings closely while preparing Lucidum for acquisition, and the number came to over $39,000. When Cyderes acquired Lucidum in December 2025, the Archera relationship became a catalyst for how Cyderes now approaches FinOps across its full multi-cloud footprint. One of the clearest wins has been stacking Archera on top of AWS's existing private pricing agreement.

"If I'm spending $1,000 on a workload and I'm getting a 10% discount on AWS, now with Archera on top of that, take that 10% and turn it into 20%, 30% off of that same $1,000." — Jeremy Sherwood

That combination is also why Cyderes is now moving some workloads from Azure and GCP back to AWS, to take full advantage of the flexibility Archera and AWS offer together.

The Bigger Win: From One-Person Show to an Enterprise Model

At Lucidum, Jeremy ran FinOps solo. He sees Archera as the reason that model can scale across a much bigger organization without a much bigger team. A traditional FinOps practice needs finance people who understand the money, engineers who understand the infrastructure, and someone to bridge the two; often a team of ten. Jeremy hopes to eventually give individual business units at Cyderes their own access to Archera, so teams can gradually take on more ownership of their cloud spend.

"If you had a team of ten and you're using Archera, you could now reduce that team to one or two people who could understand that combination." — Jeremy Sherwood

Their Philosophy

Jeremy doesn't think Archera is the right fit for everyone. For static, predictable, long-horizon enterprise workloads, standard reserved instances and savings plans work fine on their own. But his workloads, and AI workloads across the industry, are elastic and ephemeral in ways that make traditional one- to three-year commitments a bad fit. That's where he says Archera earns its fee many times over.

"The more elastic and ephemeral my workloads are, the more value Archera has. As long as I'm beyond that 20-day break-even point, engaging with Archera is worth it, because I can't get that savings anywhere else." — Jeremy Sherwood

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