UK - BigHand Achieves Cost Optimization with Azure Infrastructure

Related Services
Data Technology
Microsoft
Cloud

Industry
Legal, Healthcare

Company
Xebia

BigHand provides technology solutions for legal and healthcare professionals with data and insights to increase value and boost profits of their businesses. They develop and invest in technologies that help their customers identify improvements in various areas such as attorney and support staff resourcing, document production, financial performance, and matter pricing. They support 4.2k customers with over 810k users, 82% of Top 200 UK law firms, 81% of AMLAW 200, and 96% of the Top 50 APAC law firms, which makes BigHand one of the leading solution providers in the legal industry.

Why

Getting full control of Azure costs and being able to manage budgets.

What

Optimize Azure resources consumption and reduce utilization costs.

How

Unused resource cleanup and right-sizing Azure infrastructure.

Full control of Azure costs and budget management

BigHand cloud workloads are hosted primarily in Azure Platform. There are specific costs associated with the resources provisioned on Azure (Storage, Compute, Database, etc.), which are largely tiered based on the resource type. Azure costs increase based on the services and quantity of usage, and in some respects there isn’t a credit/budget limit in dev environments to protect overspending on Azure.

“BigHand had the pleasure of working with Xebia on our cost optimisation project in Microsoft Azure. Xebia team demonstrated commitment to help us optimise our Azure hosting cost in alignment with BigHand standards and policies. I would recommend Xebia to any organization looking to optimise cloud spending in Azure Cloud."

Saheed Busari Director of Cloud Engineering and Operations

Analysis and optimization of resource consumption in non-production dev environments

Unused resources in non-production environments needed to be cleaned up by identifying and eliminating resources or solutions no longer used/needed for the application on Azure that will still be incurring costs. The environments that are no longer needed as part of the project work had to be identified as well.

Other areas of focus included:

Right Sizing Compute - Getting the balance right for application resources needed in terms of right-sizing Azure consumption elements to reduce costs to an optimal level without impacting performance.

Auto Shutdown – for non-production environments, scheduling resources to only run at appropriate times (Dynamic).

Reserving Usage - Uncovering opportunities to use reserved instances to drive cost-effective cloud hosting. This is key for Azure cost control. Generally, we identify PAYG Azure resources that are consistently used on the platform which support reservation, and reserve these for a period at lower cost without impacting performance.

Unleashing Efficiency: Azure Cost Optimization

While the cloud offers enormous opportunities, managing it effectively requires an appropriate approach to cost control. In collaboration with BigHand, we embarked on a transformational journey to optimize cloud costs within the Azure ecosystem.

To streamline spending, boost efficiency, and enhance scalability, we conducted an end-to-end optimization. This process began with a thorough inventory assessment of all environments, identifying opportunities to clean up unused resources and appropriately scale essential ones to ensure efficiency without compromising performance—achieving a balance of power and economy.

Additionally, we ensured existing asset were tagged based on BigHand tagging policy and standards for easy management, allocation and tracking of costs.

BigHand Achieves Cost Optimization with Azure Infrastructure

Full control of Azure costs and budget management

Analysis and optimization of resource consumption in non-production dev environments

Unleashing Efficiency: Azure Cost Optimization

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