US Services Provider Achieves Cloud Cost Savings With HCL MyXalytics

The Challenge

Many businesses are facing a familiar challenge – cloud costs that seem to balloon faster than their revenue. This was the reality for a leading US provider of mission-critical services. Their success relied heavily on a robust cloud infrastructure, which included a staggering $15 million in annual consumption, 122 subscriptions, and a network of 1,750 servers. However, this very foundation for their growth also presented a growing challenge: keeping cloud spending under control.

The pressure was on. They needed a way to optimize their cloud usage and achieve cost savings without sacrificing the agility and innovation that the cloud offered. Identified goals were: to design a strategy to effectively track cloud spend and carry out cost optimization with a structured tagging policy, predefined budget thresholds, and cost optimization recommendations.

Their story is a blueprint for any business facing the challenge of soaring cloud bills.

Here’s what made managing their cloud environment difficult:

• Flying Blind: Without a centralized, single-pane view, they lacked a clear understanding of their overall cloud-spend across different services and accounts. This made it difficult to identify areas for cost optimization.
• Cost Creep: Public cloud costs were steadily increasing, putting pressure on their budget. They needed to find ways to curb these expenses without sacrificing performance or scalability.
• Budgeting in the Dark: The absence of a structured budget allocation mechanism made it hard to plan and control spending across various cloud resources.
• Underutilized Resources: They suspected they were paying for resources they weren’t fully utilizing. Identifying and eliminating these inefficiencies could lead to significant cost savings.
• Engagement Gap: Account owners responsible for specific cloud resources weren’t readily responding to suggestions for cost reduction. This lack of buy-in from key stakeholders hindered overall optimization efforts.
• Approval Bottleneck: The absence of a single point-of-contact for cloud spending approvals caused delays in implementing cost-saving measures.
• Missing Pieces of the Puzzle: Incomplete or missing information about account owners made it difficult to track usage and assign responsibility for cloud spending.
• Consolidation Challenge: Managing a single account with multiple application owners made it hard to attribute costs accurately and optimize spending for each specific application.