60% Reduction in Cloud Costs While Ensuring Uninterrupted Operations for a Global Financial Institution

Client: A leading financial institution with a large-scale cloud infrastructure supporting mission-critical applications.

Challenge: To optimize cloud costs while maintaining high availability (HA) and resiliency by implementing a tiered approach to workload deployment in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-AWS).

The Problem

The organization required a high-availability (HA) solution for all production workloads deployed across the Eastern region in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-AWS). However, applying a stretched cluster architecture uniformly led to excessive operational costs. Key challenges included:

  • High infrastructure expenses due to unnecessary redundancy across all workloads.
  • Disaster Recovery (DR) inefficiencies in the Western region, leading to resource waste.
  • Inconsistent HA requirements: Some applications required minimal recovery time in separate data centers, while others did not.
  • Need for a cost-efficient strategy without compromising compliance or resilience.

Solution:

A tiered workload deployment strategy was implemented to balance cost efficiency and resiliency:

  1. Application Categorization:

    • Tier 1: Critical applications requiring strict HA in separate data centers remained on the stretched cluster (AWS East 1 & AWS East 2).

    • Tier 2: Applications with lower HA requirements were migrated to a standard cluster, significantly reducing infrastructure overhead.

  2. Infrastructure Optimization:

    • Stretched Cluster: Reserved only for mission-critical applications requiring low Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
    • Standard Cluster: Hosted general workloads, reducing cloud expenses while maintaining availability.

  3. Disaster Recovery Enhancement:

    • Optimized DR resources, ensuring only essential workloads utilized them.
    • Implemented automated failover & recovery strategies to enhance resilience without additional costs.

Results & Business Impact:

✅ 60% reduction in cloud costs, saving millions annually.

✅ Optimized resource utilization, ensuring stretched clusters were used only for high-priority applications.

✅ Maintained business continuity & compliance while eliminating unnecessary expenditures.

✅ Streamlined HA & DR strategies, improving resilience without excessive spending.

Conclusion:

Through a data-driven tiered cloud architecture in VMC-AWS, the financial institution successfully optimized cloud costs while maintaining high availability and resiliency. This strategic approach allowed for efficient resource allocation, ensuring both cost savings and operational excellence.

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