Retail Excellence in the Cloud: Clothing Giant Achieves €1.17M in Savings via FinOps Transformation

Leading international fashion retailer streamlines decentralized cloud control and eliminates sprawling expenditures with HCL MyXalytics.

Overview

• The Challenge: Sprawling cloud expenditures, inaccurate tagging, and decentralized control led to significant cost leaks in MS Azure.
• The Solution: Implementation of the HCL MyXalytics FinOps platform to establish a unified tagging strategy, deep usage insights, and a recurring "FinOps culture."
• The Results: €1.17 million in savings through strategic Reserved Instance optimization and right-sizing initiatives.

The Challenge

For a global fashion powerhouse employing over 80,000 colleagues, maintaining a "lean" cloud wardrobe is just as important as managing physical inventory. However, the retailer was struggling with an unorganized cloud environment that was becoming increasingly expensive.

Operational hurdles included:

• Cloud spend sprawl: Rapidly expanding expenditures and cost leaks within the MS Azure platform.
• Broken foundations: Issues at the foundation design level of the cloud infrastructure inhibited efficient scaling.
• The visibility gap: A lack of centralized control meant there was little to no visibility on Reserved Instance (RI) opportunities or saving recommendations.
• Tagging chaos: An inaccurate tagging strategy led to cloud costs being incurred without proper attribution or accountability.

The Solution

To bring "runway-ready" discipline to their IT environment, the global fashion housedeployed HCL MyXalytics. HCL MyXalytics delivered an integrated, AI-driven FinOps platform that operationalized cost savings and accountability, shifting the organization from reactive spending to proactive financial management through:

• Actionable intelligence: Deep insights into cloud usage and costs incurred by every service across every region.
• Standardized tagging: A FinOps-compliant tagging strategy provided transparency across multiple subscriptions with custom recurrence compliance checks.
• FinOps culture: Beyond the tool, HCL FinOps practitioners guided the organization on recurring recommendations to ensure savings weren't just a one-time event.
• Persona-based visibility: RU-based cost visibility tailored to specific user personas, ensuring everyone from IT leads to financial controllers had the data they needed.

The Results

By styling their IT environment with HCL MyXalytics, the retailer realized a complete fiscal makeover:

• Total reserved instance savings: €1.17 Million—proving that long-term commitment pays off in the cloud.
• Right-sizing wins: €649K saved by ensuring VMs were perfectly tailored to the actual workload requirements.
• Eliminating digital waste: €91K recovered by cutting orphan resources that were no longer serving the business.
• Smart scheduling: €38K in additional savings achieved through automated Power Scheduling.

About the Company

An international fashion retailer employing more than 80,000 colleagues across 17 countries. Operating 460 stores globally, they provide affordable style and quality essentials across beauty, homeware, and fashion for men, women, and kids.

Is your cloud spend out of style? Request a demo of HCL MyXalytics today.