At a glance
A food manufacturing conglomerate with more than 30,000 employees worldwide needed control over their expanding cloud use, having lacked centralized delivery and optimization of cloud services for their employees. By choosing Flexera, the company achieved 12 percent annualized cloud cost savings overall in just five months.
The Challenge
Growing cloud use required better controls
One of the world’s leading food manufacturers, with $13 billion in annual sales, was seeking a solution to provide guardrails for their fast-growing, multi-cloud environment. The company had lacked a centralized way to deliver and optimize cloud services and had been using a combination of manual scripting and cloud-native tooling from Amazon Web Services (AWS).
12.22% cloud spend saved in the
first 5 months with Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization
The Solution
After a nod from Gartner, the company chose Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization
The food manufacturer had been a long-standing customer of Gartner, a global research firm. About eight weeks before Gartner named Flexera a leader in their Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Cloud Management Platforms, Gartner revealed to the manufacturer that Flexera led in the MQ.
Initially, the focus of the company was on establishing governed, self-service provisioning, while also preparing to be multi-cloud ready. They were given a two-week proof-of-concept period led on the technical side by a Flexera solutions architect.
Gartner named Flexera a Leader in the
Magic Quadrant for Cloud Management Platforms
Soon after, the company signed one-year contracts with several professional services companies to help with onboarding and implementation.
Not long after the food manufacturer signed the contracts, it shifted to a single-cloud focus on AWS, because more workloads were being migrated to that service than any other cloud provider. Cost management and optimization quickly became a priority as their cloud bill began to grow.
The company loaded their cloud bill information into Flexera’s Cloud Cost Optimization to examine their cloud spend. Cloud Cost Optimization was then able to provide a roadmap for the food manufacturer to more effectively manage and optimize its cloud spend. Not only did they succeed, but the company was able to establish guardrails to make sure the waste wouldn’t return.
The Result
Automated policies were leveraged to help manage cloud costs, which reduced waste and saved twelve percent overall
Cost optimization experts analyzed recommendations and determined how best to save money. Flexera provided a contextual roadmap of savings that spanned the full cloud bill, including instances, storage, PaaS workloads and more. They also helped prioritize the order of operations that made sense for the company’s business. The initial focus was on properly utilizing discounts and eliminating storage waste for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) reserved instances.
The team provided a customized reserved instance plan that took into account the company’s business context, cash flow and technology use cases to ensure effectiveness. Following multiple different purchases that resulted in significant savings, the food manufacturer enabled Cloud Cost Optimization’s automated reporting to check that the discounts were being used correctly. The cloud optimization services team acts as an extension of the company’s cloud group to tune these discounts and fully optimize the estate.
In the first five months, the company’s spend annualized to a 12.22 percent savings overall and 15.21 percent savings for the Amazon EC2 service.
15%
savings on Amazon EC2 with
Flexera Cloud cost Optimization
