How we reduced our client’s cloud spend by 30%

About the client

Our client operates in the packaged goods industry and is made up of 19 separate brands. Each unit operates with a degree of autonomy provided they meet their KPIs set by head office. This application of SME values to individual brands led to a siloed approach to IT. Seven different IT providers served various business units – approximately 1 600 users in total. IT can be an easy cost-saver, but without the right investment focus and prioritisation it can fast turn into an area of overspend. IT only improves your return on investment if it involves the right projects, platforms and workstreams.

Need

Cyberlogic was first brought in after one of our client’s business units suffered a targeted security hack which compromised their systems, destroyed data backups and led to 10 days of downtime. Our role was an advisory one and our mission to help them get up and running again. The incident exposed security weaknesses and the potentially catastrophic consequences thereof to both this business unit, and the others on the shared cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Our priority was to address their security concerns. It was this exercise that revealed the client had an unidentified need to optimise their cloud environment and better manage their growing cloud spend.

What we did

Azure billing is complex and detailed and can be overwhelming – making it difficult to see the wood for the trees. At a high level we simplified their billing allowing them to breakdown business unit expenses and conduct proper cost rationalisation. Our experienced team understands the nuances of Azure cost structures and so was able to provide a balcony view of what the client was looking to do technically, and then make the necessary adjustments to their Azure set-up to best manage their costs. Thereafter Cyberlogic focused on rightsizing their technology to achieve performance gains where resources were overutilized and cost savings where resources were under-utilised.

Resolution

Unexploited opportunities – cost-saving through smarter use of resources. A typical pain point for clients moving their operations into the cloud is that the origins of various charges can be opaque. This is due to the nature of cloud computing: the provider doesn’t know the context specific to each business and how they consume services, let alone how a business splits items between business units. We were able to cut through the noise and help the client understand their cost breakdown by matching each cost to its purpose. This enabled the client to make better purchasing decisions and split spend across business units.

Rightsizing technology

Within the first month of working with the client Cyberlogic saved them 60% on their Azure connectivity costs. Where the client had been using an uncapped line moving them to a pay-as-you-go plan with monitoring usage reduced their monthly spend from roughly $4000 to $600.

Other cost-reduction strategies were identified through correct load-balancing and finding smaller, individual areas of wasted or unused resources that added up to significant savings – for example, the client had upgraded their storage to accommodate a proof of concept which was subsequently abandoned. Due to an oversight, the additional storage had been retained once the project ended, so the client was paying for a service they didn’t need.

Where resources were over-utilised, we advised that some of the cost savings be reinvested in expanding their capabilities. Remote desktop services, for example, were being overloaded, creating performance issues, slowing operations and driving down productivity. Cyberlogic upgraded them to the latest generation virtual software and reported on optimisation solutions such as spreading the load more evenly and where more capacity would increase productivity. We also doubled the number of servers to which they had access, improving efficiency and access to storage with no additional cost to the company.

Conclusion

We know that the data needed to make effective decisions around security and cloud management can be overwhelming. That’s why we aim to provide proactive advice in a pragmatic and consumable manner to effectively inform our clients and help them to make the best decisions for their business. The reality is that cost management is time-consuming and complex. We can provide the expertise and capacity to analyse, manage and reduce clients’ spend.

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