Case Study:
Cashflows Europe

20% monthly reduction in AWS costs whilst tripling transaction volumes.

Requirements

Cashflows Europe needed to modernise their CloudOps support function to take advantage of their investment in AWS. Key requirements included:

Enhance observability and alerting.
Improve reporting, formalised incident management, significantly enhance configuration of PRTG for core monitoring on Microsoft Windows.
Drive operational efficiency.
Doing more with less through enhanced automation of deployment, environment management (e.g. patching) of Microsoft and Linux based operating systems and services, storage and associated Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse solution hosted on Windows based Amazon EC2 instances.
Improve resilience and quality of service.
Ensuring robustness and premium service levels to service increasing transaction volumes.
Increase change velocity.
Accelerating change implementation whilst improving the reliability of the environment. Using DevOps pipelines to optimise the deployment of application and infrastructure code.

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Critical Success Factors:

Stability

Minimise service disruptions and heighten platform reliability through automated deployment processes.

Risk

Reduce the risk footprint through improved configuration, increased security, enhancements, and patch compliance.

Compliance

Improve PCI compliance scores for the infrastructure, eliminating critical issues or findings.

Quality of Service

Optimise platform capability, tripling transaction volumes, and reducing service costs by 20%.

Our Solution

Expert Thinking was engaged to review the existing AWS environments and make recommendations to improve overall service quality. The existing service was built using CloudFormation with Chef scripts to configure the Amazon EC2 instances and EBS storage services, managed within autoscaling groups. Having reviewed our recommendations, Cashflows requested us to take over the management of the cloud platforms to transform service quality, ensure continued security through federation with AWS Directory Service, and increase service automation and eliminate infrastructure outages that had a profound impact on the business.

A three-year fixed price service was agreed to provide 24×7 CloudOps support and lead the transformation for how Cashflows transform the way Cashflows managed their cloud environment.

We collectively defined a set of key SLOs that would drive the delivery of the service and ensure the right focus for transformation activities, focusing on three areas:

1. Automation
Utilising AWS Systems Manager for task automation and reducing manual processing errors. Focus areas included application deployment, patching of the environments, improved alerting, and certificate management on Microsoft Windows and Linux based operations systems.

2. Financial efficiency (FinOps)
Using AWS Cost Explorer to optimise service utilisation and reduce service costs.

3. Governance and documentation
Ensuring organisation-wide benefits from the enhanced service quality.

The Benefits

The approach and service transformation (achieved in two years – one year ahead of schedule), with the service successfully transitioned to a new internal team.

Reliability
Massive velocity Major improvements 20% monthly
improvement in service quality, meeting “four nines” for infrastructure uptime. Optimising and improving CloudFormation and Chef code improved the overall stability and consistency of the environment across stacks and through the improvement of production environment configuration.

Release velocity
Significant increase in release velocity through optimised automated pipelines, increasing innovation, agility and competitive advantage – supporting a tripling of transaction volumes over two years, whilst improving overall service quality.

Compliance
Major improvements in overall risk posture and PCI-DSS audit performance through automation of patching, certificate management, documentation, process enhancement and quality of monitoring/service management and reporting.

Cost benefits
20% monthly infrastructure cost reduction through improved automation and delivery of all outcomes in two years, enabling the customer to bring the service back in-house.