Case Study: Parcel Company Cloud Spend Reduction

A FinOps initiative boosted this organisation’s ability to reduce their cloud spend within a quarter by 28%.

OBJECTIVES

• Provided cloud cost expertise, advice, governance, and controls. This included implementing showback chargeback models.
• Established and grew a FinOps function which monitored the cloud cost and usage data in consumable dashboards.

SOLUTION

• Assisted with budgets and forecasting and creating a cloud resource tag strategy for current compliance issues. Supported the evaluation and implementation of a Cloud Cost Optimisation tool. Ultimately, reduced their AWS Cloud spend by 28% and supported a Lift & Shift initiative.
• Utilising the three phases of FinOps (Inform, Optimise, Operate), achieved cost accountability, rate and usage optimisation, and unit economic spend management.
• The Optimise and Operate phase terminated 29,113 instances across the AWS estate. This was reached by identifying which compute resources ran for 24hrs at less than 0.1%, for 24hrs at less than 1%, and for 1 week at less than 1%.
• Defining schedules based on workload management enabled compute, storage and database resources to be automatically started and stopped (30min prior or post run times).

BENEFITS

• Reduced the cloud spend by 28% while ensuring a tag strategy allocated cloud cost and usage to the appropriate team owners.
• Cost accountability and unit economic spend management was implemented.