Our client provides trade credit insurance, surety, and collections services in more than 50 countries. It has access to credit information on more than 240 million companies worldwide, helping protect companies from payment risks associated with selling products and services on trade credit
The Challenge
The client had an extensive infrastructure deployed on Microsoft Azure, but it lacked cloud hygiene, which led to escalating cloud costs. It kept non-production resources such as Azure Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines running 24/7. Its SQL database backup was clogged with low-priority logs, requiring additional storage and leading to higher cloud spend. The client continued to pay for on-premises and Azure licensing costs and did not have a consolidation strategy.
Various development teams maintained separate bastion hosts and jump boxes to access cloud resources, which resulted in repetitive resource deployments across different environments and required manually infrastructure provisioning, creating additional burdens on the development team. This took up to two to three days, causing release delays.
The Solution
The client partnered with Persistent to sanitize its Azure landscape and optimize costs with strategic plans. As a Microsoft Azure partner for more than three decades, Persistent was able to secure a hybrid benefit plan for the client that delivered a 49% license discount for Azure servers.
We developed and deployed a centralized bastion host and jump box to access all resources monitored for usage. To right-size the client’s Azure landscape, we automated the spin-up and down of resources based on business hours and deleted all orphan resources the client paid for earlier. To further decreased costs, we reserved instances that could be provisioned at a future date based on our cloud experience.
To clean up on-cloud storage, we customized the logs to meet business requirements, eliminating the need to log all events. Furthermore, we automated infrastructure provisioning single-click deployments, which allowed the client’s development teams to spin infrastructure within two to four hours
The Outcome
The client was able to:
- Secure a licensing discount of 49% for Azure servers
- Right-size cloud resources with automated spin-up and shutdown, further reducing cloud spend.
- Accelerate infrastructure provisioning time from three days to four hours.
- Tap into higher resource discounts with reserved instances.
- Adopt a licensing strategy that reduces overall spend.
