“SXiQ has created an innovative roadmap to unlock 20% savings off our monthly cloud costs, enabling us to remain competitive for our customers.”
Head of Enterprise Platforms
SXiQ partners with leading Digital Marketing Services provider to identify significant savings in their AWS cloud & design a roadmap for effective & sustainable ongoing cloud cost management.
The client now has a clear roadmap to unlock 19% savings off their monthly cloud costs, enabling them to remain competitive & innovative.
Background/Scenario:
As Australia’s leading digital marketing partner to small business, this organisation was experiencing significant cost pressures from running one of the largest AWS cloud environments in the Southern Hemisphere. The incumbent AWS Cloud solution had a dated design, based on patterns implemented approximately 3 years ago. This was impacting the clients ability to remain competitive in the market for digital marketing services to small business.
This organisation engaged SXiQ to deliver expert consultancy which assessed where they could realise significant cost savings, and provide recommendations for best-practice ongoing financial management of their cloud operations to enable a cloud environment with sustainable cost management principles baked in.
The Challenge
- Deliver ongoing operational savings in total Cloud Spend
- Client wants to enable greater adoption of Cloud native services
- Establish a commercial model to further benefit the business ongoing
- Create greater flexibility for the adoption of a multi-cloud strategy
- Consultancy activities must be self funding within the existing Cloud Expenditure Budget
The clients’ AWS Cloud had a dated design, based on patterns implemented approximately 3 years ago, specifically around;
- Heavily customized deployment tools
- Large adoption of IaaS services
- Proprietary Databases
The ongoing cloud platform costs were growing exponentially as the business moved its entire operation out of the datacenter and onto cloud, this then meant significant impacts to innovation, with cost blowout stifling innovation.
Furthermore the business had a small operational team that was highly utilized on daily support activities and could only fit in enhancement projects when time permits. This client required highly effective options on how cloud cost optimisation activities could be given greater focus and priority within an already stretched team.
The Solution
- SXiQ engaged deeply with stakeholders to understand current state application, service and infrastructure architecture & collaborated with AWS to unlock rebate savings
- Discovered current consumption levels by resource type
- Completed detailed analysis of IaaS Adoption, PaaS & Micro Services
- Through a process of discovery utilising a mix of AWS, proprietary tools & Power BI data visualisation, SXiQ was able to deliver recommendations that would unlock 20% savings on the clients’ monthly Cloud Spend.
The consultative, phased approach through two projects, was initially delivered with minimal impact on the business with the second project having the option of requiring business support, to assess the value of each initiative vs the cost of delivery.
The initial phase focused on identifying quick wins, prioritising and reporting on a list of initiatives & opportunities to cut costs in the business Cloud environment. Areas of focus included:
- Management database rationalisation
- Right sizing and reserving licenses
- Instance Modernisation to improve performance & reduce cost
- Opensource Postgres Database for significantly less TCO
- Always On workloads moved to Off
- Adoption of containers to increase workload density & simplify cloud portability
- SXiQ also provided a Cloud DevOps engineer to augment the internal team’s ability to implement the recommendations.
The Results
- 20% cost savings on AWS billing over 3 years
- Delivery of new Landing Zone to AWS best practice to simplify future management and compliance
- Delivery of new IAM/SSO architecture to improve security and delegation of functions
- Support from SXiQ ongoing to augment the clients’ internal implementation of recommendations
The organisation now has a roadmap to realise 20% of savings on their cloud operations, via a mix of low impact, quick win activities & higher business support, strategic activities to provide a sustainable, long term cost optimised cloud operation.
They now have a modern cloud implementation leveraging PAAS services such as Opensource Postgres Database and Containers in an optimal way.
The client have utilised SXiQ specialist DevOps resources to assist their team to implement the recommendations, embedding a focus on cost optimisation & improving the existing internal teams’ capability.
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