What pain was the client feeling?

At the start of 2022, our client, a global insurance company was spending $10 million annually in Azure, growing at 60%pa through  migrations and greenfield applications. The environment, governance and FinOps adoption was un-optimised leading to high levels of wastage and inefficiency, and a lack of visibility of how the spend was being driven.

‍What needed to happen?

First, the client needed to dig into the current levels of spend and understand what was happening in Azure, which applications were driving spend and where accountabilities and ownership resided in the Organisation. Next, they needed to know what the opportunities to optimise were, and accelerate savings to show a rapid ROI, whilst in parallel establishing a bullet-proof process and governance model to ensure initiatives were picked, owned and driven to completion.

Why did CloudStratex get selected?

CloudStratex has a mature product offering consisting of an accelerated savings methodology to front load cost savings, alongside a FinOps incubator delivering pre-baked processes and governance which are tailored to align to the Organisation, helping initial saves stay saved, and drive maturity and best practice in a self-sustaining way.

‍What was actually delivered?

The key was in establishing solid foundations. The CloudStratex FinOps Incubation service bought a wealth of previous experience, approaches and templated artefacts which with the close collaboration of the client team, allowed the following key ingredients to be quickly established:

1. A solid, repeatable FinOps process and governance model
2. Detailed optimisation analysis to create actionable cost savings initiatives
3. Comms plan and channels established to ensure that the wider group of stakeholders were understood, and appropriate comms were in place
4. Automated reporting capability developed in collaboration with the Technology BusinessManagement team to ensure customers and governance have actionable insights
5. A rich SharePoint site, serving as an initiative tracker and a central repository for all things FinOps, and, a roadmap to develop FinOps going forward.

Benefits and Impact of CloudStratex Solutions

The client FinOps was a combined client and CloudStratex team, driven by clear KPIs and goals to deliver $7M in annually recurring cost savings in 2022. On 12th December, the email went out that the team had achieved $7.2M with a further $2m in initiatives to take forward into 2023.

Going forward...

At the end of 2023, the CloudStratex team left the client with a fully functioning, global FinOps team, processes and governance, plus a roadmap of future capabilities to drive even more benefit and maturity.

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