How A Bank Saw 32% Cloud Cost Reduction In 6 Months With FinOps

Setting up FinOps initiatives to drive cost reduction and cloud optimization

• The bank intended to implement FinOps initiatives with its Consumer, Private and Business Banking group
• The organization was still in the early stages of its FinOps journey and the FinOps Framework was yet to be implemented.
• The client required a centralized Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) team of experts to manage its FinOps practices.

Analyse cost and resource utilization trends and implement recommendations

• Cloud Kinetics used the Apptio tool to perform a detailed analysis of the bank’s applications and gained insights into cost flow and resource utilization trends. We then provided optimization and cost saving recommendations to the bank’s application and cloud engineering teams.
• The bank was provided with reports, dashboards and advanced visualisations to understand key metrics and performance indicators. Cloud usage and costs could be assessed easily.
• We collaborated closely with application owners, shared detailed SOPs with them and worked together to implement the recommended optimization strategies. The initiatives included automating the nightly shutdown of non-production instances, rightsizing instances, and clearing unused cloud resources for decommissioned apps, among other steps.

The financial organization saw a 32% cost reduction with recurrent savings of $406K in 6 months

The partnership between the bank and Cloud Kinetics yielded remarkable results.

• Cost reduction: The bank achieved a significant 32% reduction in costs and the savings amounted to a recurring $406,000 within a span of just six months.
• Cloud optimization: Our team focused on optimizing the top five applications that accounted for over 50% of the bank’s cloud spend. By implementing tailored optimization strategies, the bank streamlined its cloud usage and expenditure, enhancing overall efficiency.
• Process improvement: We used Python-based automated data analysis, and provided customizable reports to eliminate the need for manual effort in analysing cloud usage. This automation significantly reduced time and resources required for analysis, allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks.

By partnering with Cloud Kinetics and leveraging the Apptio tool, the bank overcame its challenges and achieved substantial cost reduction, process improvement and cloud optimization. The case signifies the importance of embracing FinOps practices to stay competitive in the banking industry.