Inspiring growth discover our business  success stories

The organisation faced escalating Azure expenses and lacked the insights needed to manage their cloud investments effectively. Key challenges included:

• Unmanaged Costs: Underutilised resources and oversized virtual machines (VMs) contributed to excessive spending, with no clear strategy to identify and address inefficiencies.
• Limited Cost Visibility: Teams struggled to track spending and connect it to business objectives, leading to misaligned priorities and uncontrolled growth in costs.
• Inefficient Processes: Non-production environments were running 24/7, incurring unnecessary costs during off-peak hours.
• Lack of Accountability: With no clear ownership of resources, teams had little motivation to optimise their usage or align spending with organisational goals.
• Scalability Constraints: Existing processes lacked the flexibility to adapt to the organisation's growing demands, further complicating cost management.

Recognising these challenges, the organisation engaged InfraShift Solutions to implement a robust FinOps framework tailored to their needs.

‍

InfraShift Solutions delivered a comprehensive FinOps strategy designed to optimise costs, improve visibility, and establish financial accountability:

• Cost Transparency: Implemented detailed cost tracking tools, providing teams with real-time insights into their Azure spending. Custom dashboards were created to visualise costs by department, project, and workload.
• Resource Optimisation: Conducted a detailed assessment of Azure resources, identifying underutilised VMs and oversized workloads. Rightsizing recommendations were implemented to align resource consumption with actual needs.
• Automation for Cost Control: Deployed automated shutdown and startup schedules for non-production environments, ensuring resources were only active during business hours.
• Governance Framework: Established a governance model with role-based access controls, ensuring clear ownership of resources and accountability for costs.
• Long-Term Cost Efficiency: Recommended reserved instances for predictable workloads and integrated existing software licences to leverage cost advantages.
• Continuous Monitoring: Built a FinOps culture by enabling proactive monitoring of spending patterns and introducing alerts for cost anomalies, empowering teams to act before costs escalated.

This multi-faceted approach ensured both immediate cost savings and a sustainable framework for long-term financial management.

The FinOps transformation resulted in significant benefits for the customer:

• Reduced Costs: Optimised resource utilisation, automated processes, and improved spending efficiency led to a measurable reduction in Azure expenses.
• Enhanced Accountability: Teams gained ownership of their resources and budgets, aligning spending with organisational goals.
• Improved Visibility: Custom dashboards and real-time reporting tools provided stakeholders with actionable insights, enabling better decision-making.
• Operational Efficiency: Automated cost controls eliminated waste in non-production environments, ensuring resources were used effectively.
• Scalable Framework: The FinOps model provided the flexibility to support the organisation’s growing workloads without losing control over costs.

These results positioned the organisation to use their Azure environment as a strategic asset, with costs aligned to business value.

‍

To sustain these improvements, InfraShift proposed:

• Quarterly FinOps Reviews: Conduct regular cost and usage reviews to identify new optimisation opportunities.
• Advanced Forecasting Tools: Implement tools to predict future spending trends and plan budgets accordingly.
• Workshops for Teams: Provide ongoing training to ensure teams understand and adopt FinOps best practices.
• Managed FinOps Services: Offer continuous advisory support to adapt the strategy as the organisation’s cloud usage evolves.

‍