How a Professional Sports League Reduced Overspending on Cloud

Our client is a globally recognized professional sports league. As the league expanded its digital presence and operations, it turned to Orion for help in optimizing its cloud costs, focusing on reducing the financial burden of its growing cloud infrastructure.

Challenge

The client faced escalating cloud costs for its applications hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform. Monthly bills had surged to over $100K, with costs continuing to rise month-on-month. With growing business demands, the client needed to optimize its cloud spend, eliminate inefficiencies, and ensure long-term cost control without compromising performance or scalability.

Solution

Orion approached the challenge with a holistic strategy. We began by deploying the Cloud Cost Operation Maturity and Efficiency Toolkit (COMET) to enhance visibility and accountability for the client’s cloud spend. This provided a comprehensive view of cost drivers, allowing Orion to make informed decisions for cost optimization.

Next, we implemented governance and tagging policies along with automation tools to ensure ongoing optimization of cloud costs. These measures helped the client sustain cost benefits over time, with an emphasis on both short-term wins and long-term strategies.

Collaborating closely with application owners, Orion identified quick wins and envisioned a roadmap for both short-term and long-term improvements. Short-term actions included right-sizing resources, leveraging discounted pricing, decommissioning unused resources, and shifting premium snapshots to standard disks. 

Long-term plans focused on scalability and efficiency, including the implementation of auto-scaling for applications, setting up a DevOps pipeline, creating a backup strategy, and introducing spot solutions and automation runbooks tailored to the client’s unique needs. We also recommended modernizing cloud services and right-sizing resources based on usage trends. 

To prevent future cost leakages, Orion established monitoring and alerting systems, ensuring the client could maintain control of their cloud environment and spending. 

Impact

Following Orion’s cloud cost optimization efforts, the client is saving approximately $20K per month on cloud costs. The implementation of a mature FinOps practice brought greater visibility and accountability to cloud spending, ensuring sustainable cost management. The client now has an optimized cloud environment that is better equipped with cloud cost governance for visibility and sustainability.