Version 1 Implements FinOps Best Practice for Central Government Department

The customer is a UK Government Department.

Following the exit of the third-party hosting provider, our client faced urgent challenges in managing their cloud infrastructure. The absence of oversight on user access and change flows in the existing AWS systems underscored the critical need for a swift and effective transition. Key challenges included cost escalation and the migration of workloads from legacy accounts, which were hitherto treated as black boxes.

Solution

Version 1 promptly scaled the team and focused on modernisation and migration efforts aligned with client hosting strategies. A systematic approach to workload migration was adopted, encompassing phases such as discovery, planning, preparing, deployment, and improvement. Prioritising smaller workloads initially, the team began strategically migrating them to the clients Modernisation Platform.

The project had an emphasis on cost optimisation, availability, performance, and security.

While the project is ongoing, significant cost savings for the client have already been realised. Implementing FinOps best practices led to initial quick wins ahead of long-term strategic benefits. Within a month, the removal of a redundant tech stack resulted in a cost reduction of over £5000 per month across all environments. Subsequent months saw further optimisations, including savings from the removal of unused resources, infrastructure adjustments, and strategic platform migrations.

Outcomes

Version 1 was able to:

• Ensure continuous service availability, enhance security, and reduce vulnerabilities by providing around-the-clock SR25 release support outside regular hours
• Realise monthly cost savings of £2.5k by eliminating the ELK stack infrastructure, optimising expenditure without compromising functionality
• Enhance financial efficiency by potentially saving over £1000 per day through the strategic removal of outdated EBS snapshots
• Optimise the use of infrequently accessed EBS volumes, resulting in substantial monthly savings of £3.6k
• Enhance financial efficiency by removing unnecessary AWS accounts and resources, generating significant monthly savings exceeding £16k
• Achieve a total monthly savings of £13,399 by right-sizing costly MIS servers, ensuring efficient resource allocation
• Implement optimised instance start/stop procedures around bank holidays, saving approximately £500 per holiday and improving cost-effectiveness
• Realise monthly savings of £3k by optimising io1 volumes in non-production and sandpit environments, ensuring cost-effective resource allocation
• Enhance cost-effectiveness by identifying and removing unused migration volumes, resulting in monthly savings of approximately £2k
• Achieve substantial cost savings by removing unnecessary accounts and environments, and streamlining operations without compromising performance

In summary, this Version 1-led project stands as a testament to the team’s adept management of challenges, successful migration strategies, and substantial cost savings, positioning it as a model for efficient FinOps practices within the public sector.