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Background
In 2019, following multiple acquisitions, Shaw Trust embarked on a modernisation effort across its IT estate. A long-term vision was developed to consolidate the different environments across the business to further drive a digital by design agenda, one of their main strategic goals.
To kickstart this initiative, Shaw Trust recognised the need to optimise the current cloud infrastructure architecture and implement industry good practice by introducing, and then maturing, FinOps principles in the organisation.
Challenge
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Shaw Trust are consolidating their multiple services under one umbrella organisation requiring a new emphasis on technology change management processes and procedures.
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Optimisation of the current MS Azure estate was required to reduce costs and unlock budget in order to fund future investment.
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As the organisation continues its journey, the current technology management methodology must evolve to meet the on-demand nature of cloud services, making IT margin accretive product and services using the public cloud as an enabler for business success.
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Solution
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Thebes Cloud Management conducted a series of workshops over a 10 week engagement to identify the opportunities to eliminate waste and optimise the MS Azure estate, whilst also assessing existing procedures and processes ranging from the current IT contract forecasting model to consumption based cost models.
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Using our ATAI™ Framework (which brings together the best of breed practices from FinOps & Technology Business Management), Shaw Trust staff now have greater visibility and transparency in their IT cost drivers as well as starting to drive cost accountability to the edges of the business.
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By starting with the end in mind, a key success criteria was greater governance in technology spend and cost allocation, our practitioners worked closely with Shaw Trust staff to establish the foundations of a FinOps practice.
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Timescale
We successfully delivered in just 10 weeks by forming collaborative relationships all levels of the business, working with them to ensure they were trained and empowered to deliver the savings.
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Outcomes
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Created & initiated a cost remediation plan to reduce spend by 38% by eliminating waste from the MS Azure Virtual Machine estate.
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Developed a simplified forecasting model to gain transparency into cost drivers to easily track overspend/underspend.
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Achieved governance control of the MS Azure cloud portfolio by implementing robust tagging policies as well as establishing an internal Shaw Trust FinOps capability roadmap after conducting a FinOps Maturity Assessment to achieve long-term cost efficiency.
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Validated Shaw Trust’s current IT cost showback model and gave recommendations on how to implement a chargeback model.
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“Developing the behaviours and culture to drive the principles that underpin FinOps required the support and experience from the Thebes Cloud Management team. Working with Thebes Cloud Management has helped to fast track the changes required, transforming a team from being solely focused on technology performance and availability, to a team that now adopts the FinOps controls and practices in the same way they assess technical performance.”