£63,000 in Immediate Cloud Savings for a Specialist Engineering & Construction Firm
A specialist engineering and construction firm reclaimed £63,000 in immediate annual cloud waste and laid the foundations for long-term FinOps maturity.
Company Overview
The client is a specialist engineering and construction firm facing a common cloud challenge: paying for resources that were no longer delivering value. A lack of consistent tagging meant the team could not easily see which projects were profitable or where money was being wasted.
Unused servers and databases were still running and quietly draining the budget, many machines were far more powerful than the workloads they supported required, and a legacy data lake was costing roughly £3,600 every month in lost potential savings because its retirement kept being delayed.
Problem Statement
Paying for things that no longer earn their keep is the quietest kind of waste, because nothing breaks and nobody notices. Without consistent tagging the firm could not tell profitable work from costly work, so the first job was to make the waste visible and then remove it without disrupting operations.
Outcome Delivered
The engagement reclaimed £63,000 in immediate annual savings without disrupting operations, spread across £26,300 from VMs, £15,900 from disks, £11,700 from storage and £9,700 from databases, and set the firm on a governed path from the Crawl to the Walk stage of FinOps maturity.
Executive Overview
The engagement identified £63,000 in immediate annual savings without disrupting operations, made up of £26,300 from virtual machines through orphaned-resource removal and rightsizing, £15,900 from disks through redundant-resource cleanup and Premium-to-Standard downgrades, £11,700 from storage through reservations and decommissioning the legacy data lake, and £9,700 from databases through terminating unused resources and an expert rightsizing review.
Beyond the numbers, the work revealed which customers and services were profitable, gave leadership a plan to move from the Crawl to the Walk stage of FinOps maturity, and established a governance model to stop costs spiralling again.
Our Approach
We conducted a two-week analysis of the cloud environment using a Remove–Rightsize–Reserve model, which simply means clearing what is not needed, resizing what is oversized, and locking in discounts on what is stable, all chosen to find quick wins that would not disrupt the business.
Optimus identified orphaned and underutilised VM resources, storage disks tied to dormant VMs, and redundant disks suitable for removal or downgrade. We delivered a rightsizing plan as Phase 1 and a reserved-instance optimisation plan as Phase 2, reviewed databases for termination and rightsizing, costed storage reservation and decommissioning opportunities, and paired every recommendation with a governance model and maturity roadmap.
Challenges
Challenges Faced
Every engagement starts with a clear-eyed view of what was actually getting in the way, because you cannot fix what you cannot see. Here we set out the real constraints the client was working within, the costs and risks they were carrying, and the gaps that needed closing before any meaningful progress could be made.
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Send an EnquiryPaying for resources past their value
The firm was paying for resources that were no longer delivering any value to the business.
Inconsistent tagging
Inconsistent tagging meant the team could not see which projects were profitable or where waste sat.
Unused servers and databases
Unused servers and databases were still running and quietly draining the budget.
Overpowered machines
Many machines were far more powerful than the workloads they supported actually needed.
Deployed solutions
What We Did
A look at how we approached the work, from the first discovery sessions through to the changes we put in place, and the thinking behind each decision along the way. The aim is always the same, to deliver something measurable that the client owns and can build on, rather than a one-off fix that fades once we leave.
Remove–Rightsize–Reserve analysis
A two-week analysis applied a Remove–Rightsize–Reserve model to find quick wins that would not disrupt operations.
Virtual machines — £26,300
Virtual machines delivered £26,300 through orphaned-resource removal and rightsizing of oversized instances.
Disks — £15,900
Disks delivered £15,900 through clearing redundant resources and downgrading from Premium to Standard where suitable.
Storage — £11,700
Storage delivered £11,700 through reservations and finally decommissioning the long-delayed legacy data lake.
Databases — £9,700
Databases delivered £9,700 through terminating unused resources and an expert rightsizing review.
Governance and maturity roadmap
A governance model and a Crawl-to-Walk maturity roadmap were put in place to keep costs from spiralling again.