Client story Beverage Giant Raises a Toast to Cloud Savings
By Insight UK / 25 Feb 2022 / Topics: Cloud
By Insight UK / 25 Feb 2022 / Topics: Cloud
A global leader in the retail sector, with more than 200 beer and spirit brands in its portfolio, had moved to an Azure cloud environment.
The retail client’s Azure computing costs were spiralling and it needed a partner to help implement cost optimisation practices and counter further costs.
Insight’s Azure Governance service secured a ten per cent annual reduction in the client’s Azure consumption.
The alcoholic beverage sector is a dynamic and competitive environment. To ensure a healthy profit, the client had to understand the options available to reduce cloud computing costs, ensure software license compliance and associated actions required to reduce overspend as far as possible.
With a £15 million Azure commitment over three years and consumption already peaking, it wasn’t long before the client was exceeding its monthly forecasted spend.
To reduce spending further and make sustainable, long-lasting cost savings, the client approached Insight as its trusted advisor.
The client had a well-established relationship with Insight and was confident in its cloud expertise and customer service. Having already made some positive progress towards reducing its Azure spend, the client was keen to ensure it was covering all bases in driving down costs. So, it engaged Insight Azure Governance Services to reduce its monthly consumption.
Insight held an initial project meeting with the client, followed by a data collection exercise to review billing and performance information. A series of workshops were then held to discuss cost optimisation opportunities.
Insight first began by reviewing the client’s consumption data and then identified areas for potential cost optimisation. This was achieved by making use of cost management best practices such as ‘Azure Hybrid Benefit’, which helps maximise the value of existing on-premises Windows Server and/or SQL Server license investments when migrating to Azure. Insight also made use of ‘Enterprise Dev/Test’, which enabled the client to run its development and testing workloads on Azure and take advantage of numerous cost savings and exclusive rates. Further investment was made into reserved instances as well as storage optimisation through the removal of unattached disks, alongside making recommendations based on storage use best practices.
To improve the client’s overall licensing approach, Insight reviewed the client’s test and development environment to ensure there was no overuse of virtual machines.
Insight has also made recommendations to the client on its SQL usage, networking and data retention policies, which should bring further savings.
A global leader in the alcoholic beverage sector.
The company has more than 27,000 employees around the world.
To reduce its monthly cloud computing spend.
Insight Azure Governance Services, providing specialist experience of Azure environments to secure value for money.
