Cost Optimization Framework for Large Retail Enterprise

Challenge

Malabar Gold has been rapidly growing in recent years and has a strong retail network of over 250 outlets spread across 10 countries, 10 commercial units in addition to offices, design centers and factories spread across India, Middle East & Far East. The company relies on AWS public cloud to run its business applications like E-Commerce store, customer support applications, and other workloads. This has involved merging several IT environments, making it a challenge for the company to maintain visibility of its cost, especially for cloud resources.

The customer wanted to work with a partner to set up a cost/profit calculation process for the cloud to structure the existing cloud resources, provide meaningful reports to the higher management and present cost optimization recommendations on a regular basis.

Their cloud ecosystem was vast in which they needed to gain granular visibility over cloud usage by department, project, region, workload, applications, and users. They had experienced uncertainty on their AWS resources as it was not properly benchmarked against the demand and usage.

Goal

They needed a simplified view of cloud costs and remove the complexity of analyzing, budgeting, tracking, forecasting, and invoicing AWS public cloud costs while identifying consolidation possibilities, making sure that resources are provisioned, "right-sized", and utilized properly.

Solution

Crozaint used its expertise around different billing and pricing models offered by cloud service providers, and a reliable toolset and a team of financial experts to manage the company’s cloud environment based on best practices and meet their cost management objectives.

Together with Malabar Gold, Crozaint defined tagging policies and custom programs to structure their AWS environment and identify unused and unnecessary cloud resources e.g. virtual machines, storage, etc. Based on those policies, Crozaint delivers a monthly cost report with executive summaries as well as detailed information about current cloud spend and deviations from the previous month. The report also includes a separate section with cost optimization recommendations for the company’s AWS infrastructure.

By implementing the tagging policy we were able to diagnose cost fluctuations quickly and efficiently.

Crozaint Partnership

As one of the largest Jewellery Retailers in the world, they have branches spanned over various parts of the country. It was challenging for the Finance Team to consolidate AWS usage from different accounts. This created a need to have a comprehensive solution to cater to gain a consolidated view of AWS usage. They started looking for a competent AWS recognized Partner who has rich expertise in handling Cloud management for large retail sectors and the one who can design and implement a customized solution. Crozaint was recommended by the AWS team to cater to the client requirement.

Crozaint’s first order of business was to analyze and provide a simplified view of all AWS account usage.

Results with Crozaint

With Crozaint’s Cost Reliability service offering, Malabar Gold now has clear visibility of its AWS cloud spend and a deeper understanding of how individual AWS resources impact their bill.

Through its proven discovery and planning capability and best practices, Crozaint was successful in designing and delivering a unified and detailed picture of AWS consumption as per their requirement.

Moreover, the company relied upon the expertise of Crozaint to discover all AWS assets and their relationships and dependencies. They gained access to different resource utilization data and performance thresholds.

About the Client

The client is a leading competitor in the Jewellery sector. The company was established in 1993, and it has a robust retail network of over 250 outlets spread across 10 countries. Malabar Gold & Diamonds is also vertically integrated, comprising of bullion desk, design centers, manufacturing, distribution, retail, and after-sale services.