DI cut cloud spend by 40%

About.

Northern Europe’s leading media technology company were able to cut manual work and cloud spend while accelerating development.

Distribution Innovation (DI) is the leading technology company for media logistics in Northern Europe, and is a part of Schibsted. DI develops technologies for companies in need of solutions for subscription services or logistics, covering the entire value chain from order to delivery.

DI had embarked on its cloud journey and was ready to take the next step in their digital transformation. But embracing cloud cost management was bringing its challenges.

The Challenge.

Every month, DI were losing significant time to manually calculating chargebacks and showbacks. Carried out by a member of the development team, this was a strain on the time this skilled professional had for actual development.

Manually figuring out who was responsible for what cloud costs and then invoicing the right people took hours and hours of work – every single month. Because of this, it was being carried out infrequently and not to the level of granularity required.

Cloud costs were left largely unallocated. Departments’ cloud cost responsibilities were unclear. Aligning on cloud activities was difficult.

Without automation, it was difficult to understand spend, let alone find the time and resources necessary to manage or optimise cloud costs.

The Need.

To enable effective optimisations, DI first needed cost visibility to get insights into where costs were being incurred – at department, application and resource level.

DI was aware of cloud spend waste, and wanted to employ rightsizing to combat this. But first, they needed a proper understanding of cloud spend.

Better team alignment was fundamental to future cloud success. DI needed the ability to accurately distribute cost responsibilities across departments.

Enter IBM Multicloud Accelerator.

The Solution.

IBM Multicloud Accelerator automates cloud cost management, making continuous cloud cost savings a reality.

With the tool, DI has full control over their cloud spend, with teams aligned to maximise optimisations through an elimination of manual work and clear transparency in consumption. 

Automation saved DI enough hours that they were able to hire another engineer to strengthen their IT capabilities. Without the financial and resource burden of manually calculating cloud costs, DI were able to better harness the cloud’s potential to accelerate development. 

Developers are actually incentivised to balance performance with waste-reduction through IBM Multicloud Accelerator’s GreenOps feature. This feature shows the carbon footprint of resources, which adds a sustainability dimension – both environmental and economic – to their cloud management activities. 

With a rapid onboarding process managed in two-week sprints with the Nordcloud team, DI were able to achieve significant cloud savings extremely quickly.