Understanding Quali Torque: Buyer’s guide on who uses it, and why

So you’re interested in Quali’s Torque platform, but you need a little more information before making a decision.

We put together this buyer’s guide to provide an in-depth introduction to the platform and help you understand the benefits our users experience.

First, what is Quali Torque?

Torque is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that simplifies infrastructure automation and reduces cloud costs for IT and DevOps teams.

Think of it as a control plane for cloud infrastructure that optimizes efficiency by automating complex tasks and preventing wasted cloud costs.

To accomplish this, the platform’s core capabilities include:

• AI-generated templates for environments: Known as “blueprints,” these templates leverage the user’s existing cloud resource configurations to define how all resources will be deployed to generate a live environment.
• Simple self-service catalog: Users can launch find and launch these environments via Torque’s native catalog in just a few clicks, thereby removing the complexity of provisioning cloud infrastructure and environments.
• Cloud governance: Role-based access controls dictate who can build or modify environment templates and who can simply launch them. Meanwhile, Torque handles all cloud security authentication so our customers can democratize access to launch cloud resources without distributing security credentials. And with native cloud governance policies and custom workflows, Torque administrators can ensure all resources deployed align with their standards.
• Day-2 Operations: Those with admin-level permissions can define complex actions for their cloud resources and environments as custom workflows in Torque. Users can execute them in a single click via Torque’s native UI, while admins can automate them based on custom schedules and in response to specific events.
• Cloud cost optimization: Torque monitors the resources and runtimes for everything deployed and tracks costs in its native dashboards. Torque’s ML-powered cost optimization tool automatically identifies when resources that users have deployed are sitting idle and calculates the potential savings of terminating those resources—providing administrators with insight into the biggest drivers of wasted costs.

For a look at this functionality in action, watch this brief video:

What Problems Does It Solve?

Many organizations face “infrastructure sprawl” and management inefficiencies due to a flood of configuration requests, unmonitored usage, and ever-growing cloud costs.

Conventional methods using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools or cloud templates create bottlenecks and blind spots, making it hard to scale and maintain control over cloud resources.

Torque addresses these challenges by leveraging the user’s existing cloud resources—including those defined via IaC or similar tools—and simplifying and streamlining the entire infrastructure management process.

This results in less time and manual work spent orchestrating, delivering, and debugging cloud environments, while also enforcing guardrails to maintain security and cloud cost efficiency.

Who Uses Quali Torque?

Specifically, Torque platform is most often used among IT and DevOps teams that are overwhelmed by a constant pressure to fulfill a deluge of environment requests rapidly and efficiently.

Here are some of the common use cases that those teams leverage Torque to support:

• DevOps to scale cloud infrastructure: DevOps teams that rely on traditional IaC tools often struggle to work across large repositories to orchestrate the environments needed to support IT workloads or software pipelines. Torque connects to the repository—making it easier to provision those resources when needed—and allows the user to submit natural-language AI prompts to automatically generate reusable templates that can launch a cloud-based environment. Once live, DevOps teams can accelerate Day-2 operations with custom workflows, which can be executed in single click and automated based on specific events or recurring schedules.
• Platform engineering to simplify developer experience: In many cases, the developers and other users who need to run cloud infrastructure and environments lack the expertise in those tools to do so independently. This results in more tickets for the DevOps or IT staff who are skilled enough to complete this work, creating a bottleneck that slows the execution of all work that relies on those environments. Torque provides a simple catalog from which developers can find and launch the environments they need in just a few clicks—without the learning curve. This approach boosts productivity and makes life easier on both the DevOps engineer responsible for building environments and the developers who need to run them.
• Customer-facing software demo, training, & proof-of-concept environments: Those tasked with enabling and supporting customers rely on a diverse range of software environments to conduct demonstrations, training sessions, and other customer-facing work. These can be tedious to orchestrate and maintain, resulting in fewer customer engagements and heightened risk of performance issues due to infrastructure bugs or errors. Torque’s reusable environment templates eliminate the manual work to deliver these environments, while the self-service catalog enables customer-facing teams to run the environments they need on-demand.
• Optimizing AI models & ML apps: Ensuring AI models and applications leverage the most accurate and up-to-date resources can be complex and time-consuming—which can result in poor performance, accuracy, and wasted costs. IT and DevOps teams supporting data scientists and others who rely on AI apps have leveraged Torque to define the resources and automate the execution of critical tasks needed to maintain an AI application. This includes defining the cloud stack supporting the application itself (including cloud-based GPUs) and automating the execution of actions to maintain data quality, inference accuracy, and cloud cost optimization to cut down on the manual work needed to deliver these applications.

While these are some of the common use cases we see, they are not the only ones. Torque is flexible to support the resources needed to deliver applications of all kinds.

If you have a unique use case in mind, book a demo with our team to see if Torque is the right fit.

Why Should You Care?

Here are a few reasons that Torque could be valuable for you and your team:

If you’re tasked with provisioning infrastructure and/or orchestrating environments:

• Get off the hamster wheel on infrastructure management: Torque enables IT and DevOps teams to break free from firefighting mode by automating common and repeatable requests. With a centralized service catalog, teams can ensure environments are reproducible, cost-transparent, and policy-compliant, reducing the manual workload and optimizing resource utilization. Torque offers clear visibility into who is using which environments, how often, and at what cost.

If you’re in leadership and need to optimize how your teams operate:

• Elevate infrastructure to the business level: By bringing infrastructure management closer to business needs, Torque creates a common language between the consumers (developers, business units) and the producers (IT and DevOps teams). This alignment ensures that infrastructure is not just a technical resource but a strategic enabler of business goals. When IT and DevOps teams can manage infrastructure with the business context in mind—such as project priorities, cost constraints, or compliance requirements—it leads to more informed decision-making, better resource allocation, and faster time-to-market. Torque bridges the gap between demand and delivery by providing self-service capabilities that empower users while maintaining control and governance, fostering a collaborative environment where both sides work towards shared business objectives.

What Makes Quali Torque Unique?

Torque goes beyond traditional Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools and cloud templates. It offers a centralized and governed service catalog that enables seamless automation and orchestration of infrastructure provisioning.

With Torque, IT and DevOps teams can efficiently manage environments without getting stuck in repetitive tasks, gaining full visibility into cloud usage and costs, and ensuring environments are always compliant and optimized.

How Can I Justify Adopting Torque?

We offer flexible pricing options to align with your expected usage and budget.

Here are some of the results you can expect that will more than offset the level of investment in Torque:

1. Increase Productivity and Efficiency: Consider the time savings for IT and DevOps teams by accelerating the delivery of environments and enhancing agility and time-to-market for new applications or services. We’ve seen users transform environment orchestration processes that took 2 days of work into a one-click process that launched the environment in a matter of minutes.
2. Reduce Operational Costs: Highlight the ROI from cost savings through automated decommissioning of unused resources and optimized usage patterns. Teams that leverage a service catalog with Torque have seen up to an 80% reduction in cloud costs within a few months.
3. Provide Clear Business Value: Torque’s detailed reporting and analytics connect infrastructure usage to business priorities so leadership can understand cloud ROI and improve financial planning and accountability.
4. Facilitate Governance and Compliance: Torque’s built-in governance features automate policy enforcement, execute complex actions, and provide comprehensive audit trails, helping to reduce risks related to security and compliance.

What are Some Torque Success Stories?

Organizations across various industries are already reaping the benefits of adopting Torque.

Here are a few examples of how Torque is transforming infrastructure management:

• Global Enterprise Reduces Cloud Costs by 80% in One Month: A multinational corporation adopted Torque to manage its cloud environments more effectively. In the first month, they achieved an 80% reduction in cloud costs by eliminating unused resources and optimizing usage patterns. Meanwhile, the automation of common requests led to significant time savings, allowing the IT team to focus on strategic initiatives instead of firefighting.
• Leading Financial Institution Cuts Environment Setup & Provisioning Time by 90%: A major financial services company struggled with long wait times for environment provisioning due to manual processes. By implementing Torque’s service catalog, they reduced environment setup times by 90%, from days to just hours. This acceleration in provisioning improved developer productivity and sped up the deployment of new services, giving them a critical edge in a highly competitive market.
• Tech Company Increases Deployment Velocity by 4x: A large technology firm integrated Torque into their existing CI/CD pipelines, allowing developers to provision test and production environments on-demand. This integration led to a fourfold increase in deployment velocity, reduced errors, and minimized delays. With Torque, the team was able to launch environments in minutes, cut down on approval processes, and maintain consistent configurations across multiple environments.
• Healthcare Organization Achieves Full Compliance and Reduces Security Risks: A healthcare provider needed to meet strict compliance standards while managing their cloud infrastructure. By adopting Torque, they automated policy enforcement and auditing, reducing security risks and ensuring all environments met regulatory requirements. The organization also benefited from a 60% decrease in the time spent on manual compliance checks, freeing up resources for more strategic tasks.
• Retail Giant Saves Over $500K in Annual Cloud Costs: A leading retail company used Torque to gain visibility into its cloud usage and optimize resource allocation. By automatically shutting down idle resources and rightsizing environments, they saved over $500,000 in cloud costs annually. Additionally, Torque’s analytics helped them align infrastructure usage with business priorities, driving further cost savings and efficiency gains.

These examples demonstrate how Torque can deliver significant operational savings, enhance productivity, ensure compliance, and align infrastructure management with business goals, all while simplifying the overall management of cloud environments.

How Can I Get Started with Torque?

To quickly realize the benefits of Torque, follow these steps:

1. Identify the Most Common Requests: Analyze your existing ticketing or request management system to identify the top 3-5 environment requests that are most frequent and critical to your operations.
2. Implement a Service Catalog: Use Torque to create a self-service catalog for these common requests. This allows users to provision environments themselves, reducing the number of incoming requests and freeing up IT and DevOps teams for higher-value work.
3. Roll Out, Monitor, and Optimize: Launch the service catalog internally, communicate its benefits to both technical and non-technical users, and provide training to drive adoption. Track the impact on request volume, response times, and cost savings, then refine and expand the catalog to include more services.

Start small by automating the most frequent tasks and see immediate benefits. With Torque, you can demonstrate value quickly, build internal support, and pave the way for broader adoption across your organization.

Ready to see Torque in action? Visit the Torque Playground now!

By embracing Torque, you ensure your infrastructure management strategy is not just efficient but also scalable and aligned with your business needs.