SoftwareOne case study

Financial services firm bridges FinOps gap

When a financial services firm lost the support of its FinOps managed services provider, SoftwareOne stepped in to help fill the gap. With SoftwareOne’s FinOps Services, the company was not only able to mature its in-house FinOps practice but achieved significant cost savings in cloud spending.

SoftwareOne was called in on short notice to help a financial services business with a multi-million dollar annual cloud budget maintain and develop its FinOps practice, and identify opportunities to reduce cloud spending by around USD 500K. Over a short engagement of just a few months, SoftwareOne also supported the company in its migration to a new FinOps platform and helped the organization build the capabilities it needed to bring its FinOps practice fully in house.

USD 500K
in cloud costs saved through FinOps practices
Maturity
of in-house FinOps capabilities
Opportunity
for greater innovation and growth

Client: Large financial services firm
Industry: Finance
Platform: AWS Cloud
Services: Cloud Financial Management (FinOps)
Country: United Kingdom

Sudden need for short-term FinOps support

A large financial services company with a complex Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment needed help fast when its managed services provider stopped supporting the company’s FinOps practice on short notice. Because reliable and scalable online services are critical for meeting its customers’ needs, the company couldn’t risk losing visibility into how it was using AWS resources – and how it was spending its budget. Operating in the highly competitive finance sector, it also needed to continually optimize its cloud consumption to stay efficient and keep costs down wherever possible.

The company already had a small in-house FinOps team, but it wasn’t yet prepared to manage the day-to-day demands of a large and complex cloud estate on its own. With a goal of bringing its FinOps practice entirely in house, the organization needed short-term support to help mature its capabilities while keeping existing services running as usual. This meant getting help so that it could provide regular internal reports on chargebacks and spending, complete projects aimed at saving on cloud costs and get the most out of its investment in FinOps. It was also looking for guidance on the FinOps tooling it would use for its in-house practice. It turned to SoftwareOne for help.

Silhouette of a person walking on a bridge.

Agile working and close collaboration for quick results

SoftwareOne stepped in quickly, working to understand the company’s FinOps goals and analyzing how the organization managed its cloud resource use and spending. It met with key stakeholders from across the business to stay on top of developments in the customer’s FinOps environment, identify anomalies and capability gaps and look for ways to optimize practices. In effect, it operated as an extension of the company’s internal FinOps team.

Working with the company in an agile way, SoftwareOne was able to get up to speed rapidly and provide valuable support and guidance. The SoftwareOne team helped the company understand how to manage its cloud consumption and spending in better ways. It analyzed the existing cloud estate, right-sized resource use and savings plans and optimized configurations and other technical aspects for improved performance. It delivered insights that enabled the organization to get the most out of FinOps tools and processes, resolve problems faster and complete delayed optimization efforts. And it worked closely with key stakeholders across the organization, providing recommendations during weekly review sessions and monthly reports.

Whenever performance issues arose, SoftwareOne provided instant support. It quickly worked to identify anomalies, check configurations and make sure the right commercial optimization models were in place. This enabled the company to resolve problems faster than it could have through vendor support services, which saved not only time but money.

All of this produced meaningful and significant results in just a short period of time. This was vital for a customer with a complex IT estate that was spending millions of dollars each year for cloud services on AWS.

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What has been achieved in detail:

With SoftwareOne’s FinOps support and guidance, the company was able to maintain and optimize its existing practices while building its in-house capabilities. It eventually was able to take over those FinOps responsibilities on its own.
Over just a few months, SoftwareOne helped the organization to identify opportunities for cost savings. This reduced cloud spending by around USD 500K.
SoftwareOne helped the company to mature its FinOps practice, giving it more agile ways of working and greater transparency around spending. The company also gained insights for better and faster decision making about its AWS estate and optimized practices for cloud resource and cost management. As a result, it can provide customers with up-to-date and cost-efficient online services and financial products.
Improved FinOps also assures the organization of scalable, reliable services for running business-critical workloads. This means that the company is in a better position to compete, use its investments effectively and increase ROI. With its cloud costs under control, it can focus on innovating new products and services to grow the business.
The company benefited from SoftwareOne’s knowledge and experience with all three major hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft and GCP) and the wide range of FinOps tooling available. Using its FinOps methodology for optimizing services and spending in the cloud – a methodology that is certified by the FinOps Foundation – SoftwareOne was also able to provide advice and guidance tailored to the customer’s specific goals and business needs, no matter which technologies the company wanted to use.