Clients I’ve helped…

Situation:
An accounting platform company based in Cincinnati, OH, specializing in point of sales systems and automated invoicing, was struggling with managing their Azure resources effectively. They faced challenges in understanding and controlling Azure costs, particularly with granular visibility into spending, tracking, and bill comprehension. Additionally, they needed better insights into Reserved Instance purchases, Savings Plans, and the top 10 highest costing services, all displayed through intuitive dashboards. Kurt, the lead on this project, had difficulties discussing and showcasing cost-saving opportunities to leadership and IT Finance.

Task:
Kurt's main tasks were to gain granular visibility into Azure spending, accurately track expenditures, and better understand their Azure bills, especially as new services were added. He also needed improved visibility into Reserved Instance purchasing and Savings Plans, insights into the most expensive services, and user-friendly dashboards to simplify the analysis and management of Azure resources. Moreover, Kurt required a tool that could facilitate discussions on cost-saving opportunities and optimize resource management.

Action:
To address these challenges, we engaged Kurt and his team in a thorough discovery process to understand their specific needs. We then guided them through a Proof of Value (POV) process, demonstrating how our solution could meet their requirements using their own data. Our approach adhered to the FinOps framework, showcasing how our solution enables granular resource tagging, business mapping, infrastructure rightsizing, and effective budgeting and forecasting. We provided a hands-on demonstration of how these features could deliver cost savings and improve workload efficiency.

Result:
By implementing our solution, Kurt’s team achieved all their success criteria. They saw a 20% reduction in cloud costs and experienced a significant decrease in the time required to manage their Azure resources, reducing work-time by approximately 50%. This outcome not only enhanced their cost management capabilities but also streamlined their resource analysis and reporting processes.

Situation:
A financial services company encountered significant issues with data discrepancies between their CloudWatch monitoring in AWS and the reports generated by their existing third-party cloud cost optimization tool. These discrepancies resulted in inaccurate cost allocations, causing business units to absorb incorrect AWS infrastructure costs each month, which disrupted budget management and cost accountability.

Task:
The company needed a solution to accurately map the costs of AWS resources to the appropriate business units. This would enable correct showbacks and chargebacks, ensuring that each team’s budget was used effectively and that costs were accurately attributed.

Action:
After identifying the issue, we presented our solution, highlighting its capability to synchronize with AWS cost and usage data in real-time. We demonstrated how our tool addresses accuracy through frequent updates, precise tagging of resources, and effective allocation to the correct cost centers and business units. This approach provided a clear and reliable method for mapping costs and ensuring proper budget usage.

Result:
Implementing our solution led to a 15% reduction in cost misallocation. This improvement translated into substantial savings for the business units that had previously been overburdened by inaccurate cost allocations, leading to more effective budget management and better financial outcomes.

Situation:
A healthcare company providing applications and services to connect patients with benefit programs was experiencing challenges with visualizing their AWS cloud costs. Despite a significant annual AWS spend of around $3M and using AWS native tools, they struggled with understanding the true cost of running applications in the cloud, particularly due to inconsistent resource tagging and ad hoc cost queries from leadership.

Task:
The company aimed to achieve three main objectives: improve cost visualization with more granularity, empower different teams with detailed information for data-driven decision-making, and establish a robust budgeting and forecasting model to proactively manage their AWS footprint.

Action:
We worked closely with their team through the evaluation process, demonstrating how our solution could address their needs better than the native tools and other third-party options they were considering. Our solution provided enhanced visualization of costs at a granular level, facilitated accurate cost allocation and showbacks, and supported budgeting and forecasting to stay ahead of cloud expenses.

Result:
The implementation of our solution led to significant improvements in their FinOps practices. Showback and cost allocation accuracy reached nearly 100%, and teams were able to engage in clear, data-driven discussions with leadership about their monthly cloud spend. This maturity in their cost management practices enabled them to better understand and control their AWS cloud costs.