FinOps Lowers Cloud One Customer’s Costs

Use of prepaid savings plans and reserved instances raises cloud spending efficiency and aligns with operational demands 

 

Client: Department of Defense Customer

 

Mission: "To continually innovate with DOD customers and Cloud One’s cloud service providers in delivery of state-of-the-art, secure and cost-efficient computing environments as managed services.”

 

Mission Need

The DOD customer was using a multi-cloud environment within Cloud One, the DOD’s premiere enterprise cloud, to host and run its mission applications and compute and storage resources. The environment consisted of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure secure government clouds and provided applications, compute and storage as a service to the customer’s mission end users. Budget constraints and tightened funding drove the customer to look for ways to contain costs while maintaining high IT service quality for warfighters.

 

SAIC Solution

The DOD customer engaged SAIC to deliver cost efficiencies in the management of its Cloud One computing resources. We moved from on-demand purchases of cloud resources to buying them for the customer through prepaid savings programs and discount pricing plans called reserved instances offered by the cloud service providers.

What We Did

  • Implemented and tailored our CloudScend Management Platform to manage the customer’s multi-cloud environment, including daily operations, billing, compliance and security functions.
  • Tracked and analyzed the computing usage and patterns of the customer’s end users with the visualization tools in our cloud management platform.
  • Determined the pattern of resource usage over time and optimal corresponding amounts of reserved instances, which were purchased ahead of time at a per-instance discount, as well as optimal times to use savings plans, which offered lower rates for prepaid cloud resources to be used within specified time periods.
  • Transitioned the customer from the higher “pay-as-you-go” prices to a strategic buying approach that since has been continuously monitored and optimized.

 

Mission Impact

By orchestrating the use of reserved instances and savings plans, SAIC helped the customer achieve an immediate 15% cost savings on Cloud One compute and storage. The warfighter end users of the customer got the same instant availability of computing resources and level of performance for their critical missions. Continuous monitoring and optimization has helped deliver further cost savings to the customer.

This cloud financial optimization activity, also known as FinOps, based on data-driven analysis, gave the customer better-informed buying decisions in balance with funding and other considerations. The cost savings enabled the customer to redirect funds toward the modernization and migration of additional mission applications and systems to its Cloud One environment.

 

SAIC® is a technology integrator focused on advancing the power of technology and innovation. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, the company has approximately 24,000 employees.