Unlocking significant cost savings with FinOps cloud operating models
A prominent financial services organisation in Australia and New Zealand faced challenges with overspending on AWS infrastructure due to inefficient resource management. Cevo was engaged to implement a FinOps-based cost optimisation methodology leveraging automation and various AWS tools. This resulted in a 40% reduction in AWS spend, improved resource allocation efficiency, and proactive performance enhancement, fostering innovation and new growth opportunities for the organisation.
40%
Reduction in AWS spend
FinOps
Cevo NexusTM solution
Financial Services
Industry
The customer is a prominent financial services organisation that offers banking, superannuation, retirement and advisory services in Australia and New Zealand.
Business challenge
The financial organisation faced challenges relating to overspending on their AWS infrastructure, due to inefficiencies in resource allocation and management. Their existing approach to managing AWS resources was manual and reactive. They lacked a systematic way to identify idle, underutilised, or oversized resources, resulting in resource wastage and higher-than-necessary costs. With a diverse set of AWS resources, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, EBS volumes, S3 buckets, Redshift clusters, and CloudWatch metrics, the organisation struggled to effectively manage the complexity of its cloud environment. This hindered their ability to optimise resources without specialised tools and automation. There was a need for a comprehensive solution to optimise and streamline their cloud resources.
In addition, the organisation lacked necessary visibility into its cloud spending patterns and usage trends. This lack of insight into their cloud environment made it challenging to proactively identify areas for cost-saving opportunities and hindered their ability to make informed decisions regarding resource utilisation and budget allocation. They needed a solution that would automatically recommend and execute resource rightsizing based on actual usage patterns and best practices, allowing them to achieve optimal performance while minimising costs.
Solution
Cevo was engaged by the financial services organisation to implement the FinOps cost optimisation methodology, in partnership with sibling business, D6 Consulting.
The project focused on optimising the organisation’s AWS infrastructure through automation. This included utilising various tools such as Apptio Cloudability, AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Budgets and AWS Cost Anomaly Detection to monitor and analyse spending trends and anomalies.
In addition, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS Compute Optimiser, and other AWS Well-Architected tools were leveraged to identify and execute rightsizing recommendations for EC2, RDS, EBS, S3 buckets, Redshift, CloudWatch, and other AWS resources. Through the use of AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Systems Manager, and AWS Event Bridge, rightsizing actions were automated. This included stopping or terminating idle resources, resizing or deleting unused resources, and applying lifecycle policies. These automations prompted the organisation to purchase Reserved Instances and Saving Plans by providing supporting cost-saving metrics.
A scheduler was developed for easy automation scheduling, including integrated notifications, reports and dry run options. Further analysis was conducted using AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR) and AWS Athena to generate custom reports and dashboards on their cloud financial performance and optimisation outcomes.
By integrating agile and collaborative methodology into the change process, Cevo and D6 effectively managed the organisation’s FinOps transition, ensuring both the company and its stakeholders adopted the changes seamlessly. As part of this approach, daily scrum stand-ups, fortnightly scrum ceremonies and monthly steering committee updates occurred across teams. During these meetings, Cevo, D6 and the financial organisation were able to monitor progress, track cloud costs, identify any technical issues for quick resolution and implement optimisation strategies.
Outcomes
The implementation of the FinOps program has resulted in several tangible business outcomes for the financial organisation:
- Reduced AWS spend by 40% through the introduction of a number of cost optimisation measures, improving agility and financial strength.
- Improved visibility of opportunities for further cost optimisation to encourage data-driven decision-making regarding resource utilisation and budget allocation for cost-efficient cloud management.
- Automation-driven operational efficiency has optimised the organisation’s resource allocation.
- Proactive performance improvements have fostered innovation and created new avenues for growth for the organisation, allowing them to pursue new business models and revenue sources.
- Smooth integration of change via the integration of agile and collaborative methods into the change process to successfully embed FinOps as a regular practice.
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