Unlocking a more cost-effective public cloud for manufacturing

The challenge

The company is one of the world’s largest manufacturing firms, with a substantial footprint and thousands of employees throughout Asia-Pacific, Europe and the United States. It has more than 150 facilities worldwide and is a leader in its field, with a focus on sustainable packaging using recyclable materials. 

Cloud-based digital transformation is driving an enormous amount of innovation within the global manufacturing industry, as organisations realise the benefits and efficiencies that cloud provides. Although, as these footprints start to swell, they can quickly become complicated and costly, with many firms losing visibility over how their stacks are integrated. 

With a significant investment of US$225,000 per month in cloud, the manufacturing company was facing difficulties in maintaining visibility and performance, whilst managing cost. 

Overall, the organisation was hampered by a number of core challenges, including;

1. Understanding the value they were receiving from their investments in cloud infrastructure across the stack
2. A lack of real-time visibility over how much compute, storage and networking resources were being consumed by each line of business (LOB).
3. Ensuring the company is meeting all industry and government-mandated compliance and data privacy standards across multiple geographies. 
4. Optimising costs and managing cloud resources effectively across a multi-cloud environment

This lack of visibility across the board also made it difficult for the organisation to track ROIs on its cloud investments, which was critically important for a manufacturing company of this size and scale. 

The company sought a partner that could help deliver accurate and insightful information about its cloud infrastructure in real-time, helping it to reduce unnecessary costs and reinvest this capital and deliver improved services for its customers.

Solution

After consulting with the customer to understand their major pain points, Telstra introduced a solution – CloudHealth to enable customer to track cloud usage and costs with intelligent insights in near real-time. 

Using CloudHealth from Telstra, the company was able to build a centralised data analytics platform that provided analysis, trend reporting and recommendations on the cost, usage and performance of all its cloud services in one place. 

As a first step, Telstra’s cloud experts worked closely with the customer to take stock of their cloud environment, gathering key insights into all core and critical elements across compute, storage, and networking to build out a profile and start linking all related data streams.

The result was a unified platform that provides critical insights into the customers’ entire cloud infrastructure stack, from one pane of glass. This includes a streamlined, real-time view of all cloud services, with tailored analysis on where cost efficiencies can be realised. 

As part of this implementation, Telstra Purple, a team of over 2,000 certified experts globally specialising in consultancy and professional services, delivered a range of add-on benefits, including;

• Training and education via the CloudHealth Academy: providing training on running reports and customising them to specific business needs.
• Full technical support: easy access to Telstra’s wealth of product experts and technical documentation.
• Ongoing enablement: continuous enablement and value sharing through executive business reviews.

Throughout all stages of the implementation, Telstra worked closely with the customer to ensure that all expected business outcomes were met, and that the customer was fully satisfied. Leveraging CloudHealth from Telstra, we provided a list of personalised recommendations to further reduce the cost of their cloud footprint, without causing any impact on their existing operations.

Outcome

The results of the CloudHealth implementation have been staggering, with thousands of dollars’ worth of cost savings per month. This includes a macro cost saving that was achieved in under 5 months of 20 per cent of total cloud expenditure, which is the equivalent of US$300,000 per year.

Our end-to-end support and solution allowed the company to discover severely underutilised instances and unused capacity, and has driven time and labour efficiencies, by removing manual reporting processes. This has allowed staff to focus on more value-adding activities, delivering better experiences for customers and improved outcomes for the business across the board.

Download public cloud for manufacturing case study (PDF, 525KB)