Case Study

Food and beverage giant enjoys a refreshing cloud optimization solution

At a glance

A global food and beverage company sought Flexera’s help to find a more tractable way to implement their cloud cost tracking and optimization controls. As with many organizations, their cloud usage and cloud spend were growing rapidly. They wanted to be proactive in gaining visibility into this spend and to find existing, as well as future, optimization opportunities before the spend grew unwieldy.

The challenge

Optimization efforts were labor intensive and untimely

The company had manual processes in place, but these were labor intensive and could only be executed on a monthly cadence at the end of their AWS billing cycle. Additionally, as cloud usage increased, the complexities of these processes increased as well, resulting in the need for additional manual effort to inventory and categorize their spend and to identify areas of waste and/or inefficiency.

They quickly came to realize the labor-intensive processes they had in place, along with the inability to execute these processes on a more frequent basis, were resulting in lost opportunities to pinpoint where cloud costs were being incurred. They were also unable to identify cost anomalies and could only attempt optimization after the billing cycle.

The Solution

One solution filling many needs

The company wanted a solution that would enable them to convert all the effort they had put into their manual processes into an automated platform, and allow them to run their reports on demand, utilizing up-to-date billing data. In addition to visibility into their cloud usage and spend, the company also required the ability to inject additional non-cloud costs into their analyses. These costs included labor charges for the resources needed to develop and implement cost optimization procedures, software acquisition and licensing costs for applications running on provisioned cloud resources, and charges from their third-party data management vendor.

Flexera was able to validate all these capabilities via several demonstrations with company stakeholders, and neither an official proof-of-concept or trial period were required.

The Results

Flexera One shines with extensibility and customizability

The extensibility and customizability of Flexera One were instrumental in implementing the customer’s required functionality. Through the use of billing centers and rule-based dimensions, the customer’s complex cost aggregation and allocation requirements were met, enabling the customer to add or delete members to these billing centers and dimensions as their internal team structure changes over time. The rule-based dimensions that enable this functionality are constructed from external metadata ingested into the Flexera One platform and not from cloud tags or resource metadata, further illustrating the flexibility and extensibility of Flexera One.

Furthermore, the reports the customer had previously only been able to run at the end of the monthly billing cycle could now be executed at any time, utilizing updated billing data. These billing centers and rule-based dimensions have further enabled the data to be parsed in ways that weren’t possible with the company’s previous method. This provided additional insight into cloud usage patterns.

Flexera One Cloud Cost Optimization core capabilities came into play as well, enabling visibility into cloud-provider discounts that were available and not being utilized, and identifying new opportunities where discounts could be purchased and applied. The company has now achieved full, real-time visibility into their cloud usage and unlocked optimization potential in areas that were not previously accessible.