Case Study
UST helped global tech company streamline cloud management, saved $1.5 million per year
THE CUSTOMER BACKGROUND
This multinational technology conglomerate develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, software and telecommunications equipment as well as other high-tech products and services. The company employs approximately 25,000 people and has offices in more than 75 countries.
THE CHALLENGE
Cloud costs doubled in just a year
Over the course of a single year, the high-tech company’s monthly cloud expenditures doubled. While the company significantly increased cloud usage and expanded its IT infrastructure from a single vendor to a multi-cloud environment, these changes didn’t explain the dramatic cost increases. As the IT team searched for root causes of the added costs, the team uncovered these inefficiencies in its cloud management and governance processes:
- Too many active cloud accounts that had become difficult to manage.
- Untagged cloud assets that weren’t accurately mapped to business units.
- A lack of automated cloud management processes.
- Very little visibility across cloud accounts and vendors.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Implemented Cloud FinOps Framework to simplify, optimize cloud assets
The high-tech company turned to UST to gain control of its cloud landscape. After a thorough evaluation of the client’s cloud assets and administrative processes, the UST cloud infrastructure services team recommended our Cloud FinOps Framework to improve governance, insight and accountability. The solution transformed the high-tech company’s cloud asset management capabilities in these three key areas:
- Continuous improvement — Our consultants designed a comprehensive, standardized plan to tag cloud assets and map cloud instances to business units. The plan also included visibility capabilities to track who was accessing cloud resources.
- Cost avoidance — The Cloud FinOps Framework also provided functionality to help the company optimize costs by identifying and eliminating unused assets, shifting workloads from high-cost to low-cost regions and deleting old back-ups.
- Cost efficiencies — The UST team also recommended strategies to fully utilize cloud vendor enterprise pricing plans, avoid expensive on-demand pricing, take advantage of less expensive storage options and leverage lower cost reserve instances.
THE IMPACT
Reduced annual cloud costs by $1.5 million
The UST Cloud FinOps Framework gave the company the visibility and governance strategies it needed to monitor and manage cloud assets and consumption, optimize utilization and control cloud costs. The company can easily forecast costs and create budgets for cloud usage. The cloud management team can also charge back costs to business units, set alerts for usage limits and receive recommendations for cost savings. Now, the company is saving an average of $1.5 million per year on cloud assets.
RESOURCES
www.ust.com/cloud
www.ust.com/cloud/app-modernization
www.ust.com/cloud/infrastructure