£70,000+ in Annual Savings and a FinOps Operating Model for a Travel Software Company
A travel software company uncovered more than £70,000 in annual cloud savings, around 30% of total spend, and built a formal FinOps operating model to make the gains repeatable.
Company Overview
The client is a travel software company with a strong engineering culture, but one that needed formal FinOps processes to control costs effectively. Only 5% of resources were properly tagged, which made it nearly impossible to attribute costs to specific teams or projects.
Orphaned disks and underutilised virtual machines were running silently and generating unnecessary bills, and disaster recovery and testing environments were sitting on expensive, high-performance storage tiers that their workloads simply did not require.
Problem Statement
A strong engineering culture is an asset, but engineering instincts and cost discipline are different muscles. With only a twentieth of resources tagged, the firm had almost no way to connect spend to the teams creating it, so the first step was to make ownership visible and the waste obvious.
Outcome Delivered
The firm uncovered more than £70,000 in annual savings, around 30% of total cloud spend, broken down into £8,700 of cleanup, £11,700 of optimisation, £46,000 of architectural change and £5,700 of scheduling, and adopted a standardised FinOps operating model so every pound spent is now owned and tracked.
Executive Overview
The engagement identified more than £20,000 in quick wins and more than £50,000 in further potential savings, equivalent to around 30% of total cloud spend. That broke down into £8,700 from cleanup through orphaned-resource deletion, £11,700 from optimisation through storage reservations and UAT database rightsizing, £46,000 from architectural changes through disk redundancy optimisation, and £5,700 from scheduling through automated test-environment shutdowns.
The work also established a tagging strategy so every pound spent is owned and tracked, freed up the IT team to focus on value-add activities, and moved the organisation towards a standardised FinOps operating model.
Our Approach
We moved the client from discovery mode to action with a clear three-step optimisation plan. Cleanup identified and marked unused VMs and unattached disks for immediate termination. Optimise downgraded storage for non-production environments to standard, cost-effective tiers and rightsized UAT databases. Architect locked in lower rates for long-term workloads through reservations and optimised disk redundancy settings for a significant long-term saving.
Optimus provided the resource-level analysis, and our consultants layered expert review and a tagging strategy on top so the savings were sustainable and repeatable rather than one-off.
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 EnquiryStrong engineering, no formal FinOps
A capable engineering organisation lacked the formal FinOps processes needed to control cost.
Only 5% of resources tagged
Only 5% of resources were tagged, making cost attribution to teams or projects nearly impossible.
Orphaned disks generating bills
Orphaned disks were running silently and adding unnecessary cost to every bill.
Underutilised virtual machines
Underutilised virtual machines were consuming budget without doing proportionate work.
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.
Cleanup — £8,700
Cleanup deleted orphaned resources, unused VMs and unattached disks, for £8,700 of immediate saving.
Optimise — £11,700
Optimisation downgraded non-production storage to standard tiers and rightsized UAT databases, worth £11,700.
Architect — £46,000
Architectural change through disk redundancy optimisation was the largest line at £46,000.
Scheduling — £5,700
Scheduling automated shutdowns of test environments, removing £5,700 of out-of-hours cost.
A tagging strategy
A tagging strategy was established so that every pound spent is owned and tracked.
A standardised operating model
The organisation moved towards a standardised FinOps operating model, freeing the IT team for higher-value work.