$1.1m in cloud savings

Backstory

As one of the fastest-growing organizations in the space, a leading cybersecurity company was increasingly reliant on cloud infrastructure to support its offering. After several years of hypergrowth, however, the finance team realized that its cloud spend was rising by almost 40% each year without a firm understanding what was causing the increase.

Lacking the necessary visibility into what was causing these costs to soar, combined with the fact that its cloud environment was supposedly already optimized, the leadership team was unable to put a stop to unnecessary spending. Utilizing Vertice’s Cloud Cost Optimization product surfaced recommendations across more than ten cost areas. This enabled the company to reduce its cloud spend by 23%, totaling more than $1 million in savings.

The challenge

To meet the market’s increasing need for cybersecurity solutions, one industry leading company became heavily reliant on cloud infrastructure to support the fast-growing adoption of its product. Subsequently, the cost of its AWS infrastructure increased by 40% year-over-year – a rate that quickly became unattainable.

The challenge was, with limited visibility into what was causing these escalating costs and no way of knowing how optimized its infrastructure already was, the finance team was limited in its ability to reduce this spend.

Although the technology team had begun taking steps to optimize cloud spend, without the proper tools to proactively monitor the environment, the company was wasting resources on analyzing and identifying necessary changes. Additionally, the company’s Dev Ops team struggled to communicate with the finance team about what was causing the increase, limiting its ability to have productive conversations about next steps.

The solution

The leadership team had two goals for a cloud cost optimization partner: to improve cross-functional visibility of rising costs and to actively resolve the issues that had been identified.

Up until this point, the organization’s DevOps team had been dedicating significant resources into not only identifying what needed optimizing, but also communicating the proposed changes to the finance team. While the team had already optimized much of the company’s cloud infrastructure, there was still room for improvement.

This wasn’t the only priority though. The leadership team was also looking for a partner that would automate its optimization efforts and shift attention away from simply identifying areas of improvement towards actually implementing solutions. It was crucial that the company could find ways to eliminate waste and better understand the changes that were being made. The joint goal was to be more proactive when making decisions, as opposed to just being reactive. Vertice was selected as the best solution to meet both priorities.

The results

Only once the company’s AWS infrastructure had been connected with Vertice’s Cloud Cost Optimization product, could its spend be analyzed. The product’s algorithms specifically ran 75+ automated tests across 40 AWS service categories and immediately found more than 20 optimizations the team could make across multiple categories, including database services, compute and developer tools.

Implementing those recommendations enabled the company to reduce its cloud spend by 23%, totaling more than $1 million in savings.

It was also clear from the analysis that it wasn’t yet utilizing AWS’s Enterprise Discount Program (EDP). Vertice further helped the company secure the best deal on its EDP and find additional software savings, while providing the finance team with a consolidated view of its overall software spend.

In addition to the savings it had delivered, Vertice also helped to create more cost awareness for the leadership team, facilitating conversations between the finance and technology teams. The platform improved both visibility and confidence, which in turn created more alignment between the numerous teams. The dashboard view also helped the DevOps team highlight the progress it was making and gave the finance team a feeling of improved control and forecastability over its cloud spend.