Finnish Forest Giant's Sustainable Cloud Journey with HCL MyXalytics

The Challenge

Embracing sustainability is no longer just a trend; it's a necessity. Imagine a company leading the charge in sustainable forestry products, crafting eco-friendly solutions from responsibly sourced materials. They are global providers of sustainable and safe solutions for the forest-based bio-industry with an annual cloud spend exceeding $5 million. They have expanded their global reach, employing a dedicated workforce of 18,000 across 12 countries. However, a hidden challenge threatens their commitment to responsible practices—the ever-growing cost of their cloud services.

Like many businesses, this Finnish forest giant faced limitations in cloud cost visibility and optimization. Their cloud infrastructure spanned multiple providers, creating a fragmented view of their spending. Inconsistent tagging practices further complicated matters, making it difficult to pinpoint costs associated with specific projects or departments. Untagged resources remained hidden, creating blindspots that hindered accurate cost analysis. Underutilized resources, such as unused servers, continued to drain their budget without delivering value.

Challenges relating to cloud cost management:

• Limited visibility with siloed cloud data
  • The company lacked a unified view (single pane of glass) of their cloud spend across different cloud service providers (CSPs). This siloed data made it difficult to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to different user personas and to build dashboards for informed decision-making around cloud resource optimization.
• No uniformity in tagging nomenclature
  • Inconsistent tagging practices made it hard to categorize and track costs associated with specific portfolios or service areas. Untagged resources further compounded this issue.
• Inefficient resource management
  • Underutilized resources, such as unused servers or services, and orphaned or abandoned resources continued to drain their budget without delivering value. This inefficiency not only wasted financial resources, but also led to a larger environmental footprint.
• Inefficient cost management and allocation
  • The company lacked a system to allocate cloud spending appropriately across different portfolios and service areas (show-back repos). This, combined with inefficiencies like underutilized resources, resulted in unforeseen cloud costs and frequent budget overruns.