InsightCloudSec Cost Optimization
Pay for what is needed, when needed
INDUSTRY
Fortune 500, Intelligent climate control, building systems, and temperature-regulated supply chain technologies
REGION
Global
Challenge
Company is facing a critical operational challenge with their extensive cloud infrastructure, which consists of hundreds of servers running continuously throughout the day and night. This 24/7 operation, while ensuring constant availability of their services, has resulted in substantial and unnecessary cloud computing costs that are significantly impacting the company’s bottom line. The technical team has identified that many of these servers experience minimal usage during certain time periods, yet they continue to incur full operational costs regardless of utilization rates. Company requires an intelligent automated solution that can dynamically power down idle or underutilized servers during predictable low-traffic periods and rapidly restore them when demand increases, thereby optimizing resource allocation and dramatically reducing cloud expenditure without compromising service reliability or performance.
Solution
NephoSec’s solution to cloud resource optimization, within InsightCloudSec, implements a strategic tagging system that automatically powers servers on and off according to predefined schedules. By applying four required tags to cloud resources, administrators can designate specific shutdown times (e.g., 0000 UTC) and startup times (e.g., 1200 UTC), effectively creating customizable operating schedules that align with actual business needs. This approach delivers significant cost savings—up to 64% with a 5-day workweek schedule that powers down servers during nights and weekends—while maintaining operational efficiency. The system allows for flexible scheduling options including 5-day, 7-day, or 2-day cycling patterns, with the ability to specify 12-hour or 24-hour off periods as needed. This tag-based automation eliminates the waste of continuously running underutilized resources, particularly targeting the 1,537 “non-production” instances identified in their analysis, and has already demonstrated success with 15 resources enrolled in the 5-day cycling queue, producing annual savings of over $26,500 per implementation.
Current Adoption
By assigning appropriate startup and shutdown time tags to their virtual machines (VMs), company was able to use InsightCloudSec Bots to automatically start and stop their VMs outside business hours. In the beginning, they applied startup and shutdown times to a single Azure subscription. In one month, the Cloud team saw an immediate reduction in costs of about $10-15K. Subsequently, the team has applied startup and shutdown times to all subscriptions, accounts, and projects across Azure, AWS, and GCP, and they have seen a 60% reduction in their cloud costs.
Additional Program Background
Company is a global leader in climate control, building systems, and temperature-regulated supply chain technologies. They have recently signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to offer additional industry-leading SaaS solutions in AWS Marketplace. These solutions will include SaaS offerings in the areas of climate control performance, sustainability, and safety and security. This collaboration is part of the company’s growing investment in digitally enabled lifecycle solutions designed to inspire confidence in the health and safety of indoor environments.
What’s Next:
This company’s next steps will be to establish an action plan to drive tagging compliance while continuing to verify and remove older snapshots to reduce costs. Additionally, they’ll check to verify potential cost savings from orphaned public IPs and unattached volumes. To further optimize expenses, they can move older snapshots to the Archive Tier, which will provide a 75% cost reduction.
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