SDC.
SDC achieve 16.2% cost savings with Managed FinOps
- Cut costs by 16.2%
- Improved cost allocation to 99.4%
- Saw a 40% reduction in the cost per data transfer
Project Summary.
The client.
SDC is the only platform provider that supports security and compliance requirements across the banking sector in the Nordics.
The challenge.
With cost efficiencies at the forefront of its business strategy, the company aimed to foster a culture of FinOps to improve cost visibility, optimise spending, and encourage ownership of its Microsoft Azure cloud costs at every level of the organisation.
SDC also recognised the critical need to bolster its cloud infrastructure to meet stringent security and compliance standards while ensuring an optimal banking experience for its customers.
SDC worked with Nordcloud to navigate its cloud journey effectively.
Bring blurry cloud costs into focus.
Learn how to achieve cloud cost allocation and start accelerating your FinOps progress with this free guide from Nordcloud's FinOps experts.
Our solution.
1. Landing Zone Green Field Establishment
Nordcloud and SDC secured landing zones, providing a foundation for building applications in a secure, agile, scalable and cost-effective way in Microsoft Azure.
This Green Field architectural approach was already part of FinOps Review, ensuring that SDC’s cloud infrastructure was optimised for efficiency and consistency from the start.
2. FinOps Brown Field Implementation
FinOps Assessment
To begin SDC’s comprehensive FinOps journey, Nordcloud conducted a maturity assessment over existing workloads to establish a baseline for spending and identify areas for optimisation. This assessment encompassed crucial aspects of FinOps, including cost allocation, rate optimisation and usage efficiency.
Stakeholder engagement
Stakeholder engagement played a pivotal role, with Nordcloud working closely with key areas across the organisation to understand existing FinOps practices and gather insights from various teams.
Managed FinOps
SDC then transitioned to Nordcloud’s managed FinOps model, where ongoing processes were refined to deliver greater value. This phase focused on enhancing cost allocation, implementing budget controls, and incentivising system owners to adhere to FinOps best practices.
FinOps tooling
Nordcloud leveraged advanced FinOps tooling to provide real-time insights and recommendations, track savings, and detect anomalies, empowering SDC to optimise its Azure cloud spend effectively.
Working with the Nordcloud Managed Finops team has been a breath of fresh air and the team has shown incredible ability to adapt into SDCs ways of working and organisational structure. Managed Finops has been perceived to be self driven from day 1 and the value of the collaboration is still increasing.
Results.
99.4% cost allocation.
SDC and Nordcloud started the FinOps journey in 2023 with a cost allocation rate of 74%, which increased to an impressive 99.4% within a year. This improvement highlights the collaborative efforts in optimising cost visibility and accountability.
16.2% cost savings.
SDC realised significant cost savings: 16.2% of annual cloud expenditure. Despite experiencing a surge in cloud traffic, SDC achieved stability in spend, demonstrating the positive effects of FinOps practices.
40% reduction per data transfer.
Over the course of 12 months, SDC saw a 40% reduction in the cost per data transfer within the IT system. This not only optimised expenditure but also meant SDC could deliver higher data volumes within existing budgets.
This included decommissioning resources and enhancing the architectural design standards of their core application to leverage dynamic capacity management capabilities available through Azure.
Our business journey working with Managed Finops has had three major impacts. We’ve gained very accurate insights into the cost part of our business services and also learned how to evaluate the cost of our individual services.
Our business owners have also experienced how they can follow their own costs, and we’ve now started to make a lot more deliberate choices based on cost as well as added functionality than before.
