SoftwareOne case study

FinOps brightens cloud future for Alpine Health Technologies

Alpine Health Technologies began migrating to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform so it could provide advanced IT services to clinics, insurance companies and other healthcare organisations across Puerto Rico. But it soon discovered that it needed a way to rein in fast-rising cloud expenses and make more efficient use of its new cloud capabilities.

The solution? The utilisation of FinOps cloud financial management practices and tools to provide Alpine with visibility into – and control over – its Azure consumption and costs. Lacking mature FinOps capabilities, Alpine turned to SoftwareOne, which had already helped the company gain insights into software contracts and spending in other areas. Alpine now expects to save about USD 150,000 over three years across all its Azure services. By using SoftwareOne's FinOps services, the company now has its cloud costs under control to confidently manage its Azure environment and focus on innovative IT solutions that help healthcare organisations bring patients the health services they need.

Discover how SoftwareOne helped Alpine grow its understanding of FinOps and optimise its cloud resources and spending.

$150K savings
expected Azure cloud cost savings over three years
Predictable forecasts
to help with future cloud budget planning
Faster innovation
for health industry customers

Client: Alpine Health Technologies
Industry: Healthcare, Information technology
Platform: Azure Cloud
Services: Managed FinOps Services
Country: Puerto Rico

Download PDF

Offering reliable IT services for the health sector

Reliable IT services are critical in healthcare. Hospitals and other healthcare service providers need to manage sensitive patient data securely, exchange information quickly with other healthcare organisations and operate digital equipment around the clock to provide urgent care and support.

As one of the region's leading providers of healthcare IT solutions, Alpine Health Technologies helps hospitals, insurance companies and other organisations with cloud infrastructure support, application development and IT security to ensure IT estate security, increase technical efficiency, optimise their clinical documentation and medical billing systems, and more. By offering innovative tools and services based on the latest technologies such as cybersecurity solutions, machine learning and AI, Alpine enables its clients to meet the healthcare needs of Puerto Ricos’ three million residents.

To ensure that it could continue to offer cutting-edge IT services like these, Alpine had begun migrating to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. However, it soon found that its cloud costs were growing rapidly.

Alpine has worked with SoftwareOne since 2016, receiving support for software asset management (SAM), compliance assessments, IBM audits and Microsoft contract management and renewals. Knowing that SoftwareOne had helped it control costs through these other projects, Alpine asked for support in managing its Azure cloud consumption and spending.

Two doctors walking on a white floor in a hospital.

Building Alpine’s foundation for a mature FinOps practice

Alpine planned to eventually move all its workloads to Azure, it wanted to gain greater visibility into its immediate cloud spending, improve its ability to identify unnecessary cloud consumption and grow its expertise in FinOps, a practice for cloud financial management. It also wanted to improve efficiency through greater use of process automation.

The FinOps Foundation defines the practice as: “An evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organisations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.” (link to source)

SoftwareOne began by implementing its Managed FinOps Services to help Alpine get immediate control over its cloud consumption and spending. SoftwareOne has a team of over 200 FinOps Foundation-Certified Practitioners. Leveraging their knowledge, Alpine built its in-house FinOps expertise and learnt how to use and benefit from SoftwareOne’s certified cloud management platform.

SoftwareOne’s FinOps Managed Services are designed to provide organisations with useful intelligence into their cloud software usage and costs. These services use a three-phase framework – inform, optimise and operate – to enable continuous improvement and ongoing cost efficiency. SoftwareOne began by guiding Alpine through an initial workshop and capability assessment to understand the company’s existing FinOps processes, roles and responsibilities. It then established benchmarks to help Alpine achieve its desired level of FinOps maturity and began guiding stakeholders across the business in how to right-cost and right-size their cloud environments.

To ensure that Alpine would eventually be able to manage its own FinOps practice, SoftwareOne also helped key people across the organisation learn how to implement optimisation strategies, track performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) and review budget thresholds, chargebacks, and alerts.

Could you benefit from a similar service?

Get in touch with our experts now.

Let's talk

Could you benefit from a similar service?

Get in touch with our experts now.

Cost savings, improved efficiency, and faster deployment

As it worked with SoftwareOne, Alpine grew its FinOps capabilities to the point that it could implement its own FinOps practice and began to improve visibility of its Azure consumption and control its spend. The certified FinOps platform provides the organisation with an easily accessible, centralised tool for cloud cost optimisation. Alpine can now view consumption patterns across individual departments or projects with a single click – before, such data was distributed across several separate internal systems.

With these new capabilities, Alpine has significantly lowered its cloud expenses. And the insights it can access using FinOps tooling help it to make faster, data-driven decisions to add new cloud services and deliver innovative and customised solutions that help hospitals and other institutions keep their IT environments running and secure.

Across all its Azure services, Alpine now expects to save around USD 50,000 over a year – 14% of its total Azure costs with a total saving of about USD 150,000 estimated over three years. The greatest savings have come from optimising the use of reserved instances – which reduced costs by almost USD 34,000 in the first year – as well as improving its development/testing environments and bring-your-own-license capabilities.

By optimising the development environment it uses to test solutions for its customers, Alpine can also deliver innovative new services for customers faster than before, and ensure that these are effective and cost-efficient. Using insights from FinOps tooling, product and project managers can identify inefficiencies in how Azure services are being used and make improvements and strengthen security. FinOps tooling also provides analysis and recommendations that can be tailored to specific users’ needs.

FinOps Services
FinOps services provide the transparency, predictability and governance to improve an organisation’s management of cloud costs.
Learn more

SoftwareOne's Managed FinOps Services and FinOps tooling have paved the way for us to establish effective cloud financial management which helps us to keep track of our costs and constantly optimising them. We can now say we are getting the most out of our cloud investments.

– Miguel Crespo, Security Administrator, Alpine Health Technologies

In addition, with its improved budget forecasting capabilities and growing FinOps maturity, Alpine now has the confidence that it can soon migrate all its workloads to the cloud and stay competitive in its market. SoftwareOne remains available to support Alpine whenever it has questions or needs help resolving any FinOps issues.

Connect with our experts

Share a few details about your business challenge, and we’ll get right back to you.

Connect with our experts

Share a few details about your business challenge, and we’ll get right back to you.