The Customer: Who they are
A fast-growing SaaS company that had accumulated infrastructure across two cloud providers as it scaled through acquisitions.
The Challenge: Identifying the villain
Nobody had full visibility into cloud spend across both environments, duplicate data pipelines ran the same workloads on both platforms, and monthly cloud bills kept surprising finance. “We didn’t have a cloud strategy, we had two accidental ones,” said the CTO.
The Journey: The search for a solution
The company tried a self-service cost dashboard from each cloud provider, but neither gave a unified view, and neither addressed the underlying architectural duplication driving the cost.
The Discovery: Finding IDS
The CTO found IDS through the “cloud built for data, not just cloud” positioning and asked for a cloud architecture review as a first step.
The Solution: The hero arrives
IDS ran a cost and architecture review across both AWS and Azure environments, then designed a rationalized multi-cloud strategy — keeping each provider for the workloads it did best, eliminating duplicated pipelines, and applying rightsizing and reserved-capacity planning where waste was highest.
The Implementation: The battle
Changes were rolled out workload by workload to avoid disruption, starting with the highest-cost, lowest-risk items. The obstacle: some duplicated pipelines had accumulated undocumented downstream dependencies; IDS traced consumers before deprecating anything.
The Results: The happy ending
- Monthly cloud spend: reduced 32%
- Duplicate pipelines eliminated: 15+
- Time to trace a cost spike to its source: days → hours
- Unified cost visibility across both cloud providers, for the first time
“We finally have one number for cloud spend instead of two surprises.” — CTO
Technologies used: AWS (S3, Redshift, Glue) · Azure (Synapse, Azure Data Factory)