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Optimising storage costs with an automated cleanup solution for Insignia Financial

At a glance

Insignia Financial (IFL) partnered with Cevo to implement an automated storage optimisation solution, targeting unused snapshots and detached EBS volumes. This solution helped IFL streamline its cloud operations, avoid up to $50,000 AUD in unnecessary storage costs annually, and provide safeguards against accidental data loss.

Capabilities

Intelligent Modernisation

Industry

Financial Services

Customer overview

Insignia Financial Limited (IFL), formerly known as IOOF, is an ASX top 200 company and one of Australia’s largest wealth management companies. With approximately 2 million clients, and over $312 billion in funds under management, IFL offers advice and financial solutions to help Australians reach their financial goals sooner.

Business challenge

Following recent acquisitions of MLC from NAB and the pensions and investments business from ANZ, IFL has been steadily migrating workloads from on-premises environments and other AWS accounts to their own AWS account. With growing usage on the AWS platform, IFL identified the need for an automated solution to manage unused storage resources to prevent unnecessary costs while ensuring efficient cloud operations.

Solution

Cevo and IFL deployed a combined team to develop and implement an automated storage optimisation solution. This targeted two main areas: snapshot clean up and detached EBS volume cleanup.

The snapshot cleanup process automatically scans the AWS environment for unused snapshots that have not been accessed or modified within a set timeframe. These snapshots are tagged for deletion and moved to a recycle bin, where they remain for a week, offering a safety period for potential recovery before permanent deletion.

 

The detached EBS volume cleanup process identifies EBS volumes that are no longer attached to any running instances. A backup snapshot is created for recovery purposes, and if the volume remains unused after a retention period, it is permanently deleted.

This automation is designed to run continuously, ensuring IFL only pays for storage resources that are actively used. A built-in “soft delete” feature provides a safeguard, allowing workload teams to recover resources before they are permanently deleted, reducing the risk of accidental data loss.

“Insignia’s partnership with Cevo has allowed us to accelerate our FinOps strategy. Seamlessly working with us as one team, Cevo’s help building cost optimisation tools has set us up well for the evolution of our cloud journey. This has been a critical initiative in managing our cloud cost profile, and its success has helped us gain the confidence of the wider organisation.” 
Dean Sabella
Senior Manager - Cloud Engineering, Insignia Financial

Outcomes

The automated storage optimisation solution not only streamlines cloud operations for IFL, but also avoids significant cost increases. By efficiently managing unused storage, IFL is projected to avoid up to $50,000 AUD in unnecessary costs as their AWS usage grows over the next year.

Additionally, the automation eliminates the need for manual intervention, allowing IT staff to focus on more strategic initiatives. Finally, the soft delete feature reduces the risk of accidental deletions, ensuring business continuity and providing IFL with enhanced confidence in their cloud infrastructure.

By proactively managing their storage resources, IFL now benefits from a more cost-effective and efficient AWS environment, empowering their cloud strategy as they continue to scale.

“The Cevo engineers’ professionalism, proactivity and enthusiasm ensured a successful result, and allowed us to deliver faster than if we had performed the work entirely with in-house team members. I am very pleased with their assistance helping us to mature our platform.”
Dean Sabella

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