About the customer
Industry:Telecommunication
One of Indonesia’s premier digital telecommunications providers had a complex and expansive digital ecosystem — one with many moving parts that called for increasingly sophisticated oversight.
The company, recognized as a market leader in innovation, serves millions of subscribers and offers high-speed fibre internet, enterprise ICT solutions and 5G infrastructure. The customer aimed to expand its digital offerings to better serve its customer base. This demanded increasingly complex cloud consumption.
Managed FinOps on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) would help them to build in deeper financial transparency and optimize their IT structure. With this shift in mind, the company partnered with Cloud Kinetics to roll out a
value-driven approach to the cloud.
Challenge
Avoiding financial blind spots and fixing structural inefficiencies
With growing needs, an expanding customer base and a complex cloud consumption pattern, The customer needed not just simple cost-cutting but an approach that would ensure that every spend on GCP would translate to subscriber growth and fuel innovation.
The goal – to avoid operational waste without compromising the company’s innovation and service focus.
The telecom major needed to solve these four primary pain points
Limited financial visibility across projects: A complex and vast number of projects/resources made it difficult to accurately attribute cloud costs to specific business units, products or engineering teams accurately.
Resource over-provisioning: With performance prioritized over cost by engineering teams, the company grappled with "orphaned" snapshots, idle virtual machines (VMs), and over-specced persistent disks.
Manual financial processes: The finance and IT teams spent excessive time manually reconciling GCP invoices and spreadsheets, which increased the risk of human error and delayed reporting.
Forecasting inaccuracy: Without historical data trends and automated insights, predicting future cloud spend was difficult and led to budget overruns.
Solution
Embedding FinOps discipline into GCP operations
The customer and Cloud Kinetics focused on optimizing both cost and performance and improving resource utilization by implementing FinOps
Specifically, these measures helped deliver significant change and results that the company was looking for
- Commitment management: Analyzed usage patterns to purchase Committed Use Discounts (CUDs) for stable workloads, significantly lowering the “on-demand” pricing rates.
- Rightsizing resources to ensure optimal performance without over-provisioning
- Turning off idle resources to eliminate unnecessary cloud spending
- Deleting unused resources to maintain a clean and efficient environment
- Log optimization to reduce storage and operational costs
- BigQuery table optimization to improve query performance and reduce processing costs
- Storage optimization to ensure efficient data storage and cost control
Success Metrics
Building cloud oversight and agility
The shift to a FinOps-led approach to cloud management meant the customer now has better control and oversight over their technology. Automation brought in agility as well as early warning systems. Better cost visibility meant that significant cost reduction was now possible.
Significant cost savings: Achieved a 24% cost reduction in monthly GCP spend through rightsizing and commitment-based discounts.
Automated governance: Established automated alerts that notify stakeholders immediately if a project exceeds its budget threshold, preventing month-end surprises.
Improved cost visibility: The customer can now measure the cost across projects through clear cost streams and budget allocation
Operational agility: By removing the burden of manual cost tracking, technical teams can focus entirely on deploying 5G and digital services faster.
