A leading UK financial services organization operating a large Azure and AWS estate was seeking greater control over its cloud expenditure. With annual cloud costs of approximately £13 million, the organization recognized the need to improve cost visibility, strengthen financial governance and establish greater accountability for cloud consumption across the business.

The Challenges

As cloud adoption accelerated, the organization needed better insight into where cloud costs were being incurred and how resources were being consumed. The organisation was also experiencing uncontrolled growth across its cloud estate, with limited visibility into whether resources were being scaled efficiently or aligned to business demand.

Without consistent visibility and governance, identifying optimization opportunities, forecasting future expenditure and ensuring cloud resources remained aligned with business requirements became increasingly challenging. The client engaged us to implement a FinOps capability that would provide the transparency, governance and optimization required to maximize the value of its cloud investment.

The Solution

A FinOps solution was implemented, focusing initially on three priority use cases:

• Cost visibility
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Eliminating unused resources and optimizing compute

At the point these results were measured, the first two use cases had been fully implemented, and cost optimization activities were aready underway..

The Results

Within the first 90 days, significant opportunities to optimize cloud spend had already been identified across the organization’s Azure and AWS estate.
Key outcomes included:

• £2.6 million in annual cloud savings opportunities identified across Azure and AWS
• Savings equivalent to approximately 24% of annual cloud spend
• £160,200 per month identified through right-sizing recommendations
• Further optimization opportunities identified through one and three-year cloud commitment recommendations
• Improved cloud cost visibility, budgeting and governance to support ongoing optimization

Conclusion

This engagement demonstrates how a structured FinOps approach can deliver measurable financial improvements early in an implementation while strengthening cloud governance, visibility and accountability. By combining actionable optimization recommendations with improved financial insight, the organisation established the foundations for continuous cloud cost optimization and long-term value creation.

Talk to us about how ITAA’s independent FinOps service can help you gain greater visibility of cloud spend, strengthen governance, optimize consumption and maximize the value of your cloud investment.

*Protecting our clients’ confidence is of the utmost importance at ITAA. While our case studies are based on true projects, we have used fictitious names and removed or changed other identifiable details.