Background

A UK healthcare organisation partnered with Insight to save costs by optimising its monthly spend on Microsoft Azure’s offering. Since migrating to a cloud infrastructure, the Azure estate had grown significantly, leading to an overspend of cloud resources. It turned to Insight’s Azure Consultancy team to deliver a cost optimisation review.

Challenge

Having migrated to a cloud infrastructure under the NHS’s wider digitalisation plans, the organisation’s Microsoft Azure tenant grew consistently over the years as the IT team sought to leverage a variety of resources available on the platform.

Upon partnering with Insight, the healthcare provider was operating several of Azure’s offerings in their cloud portfolio, such as Virtual Machines and Storage Accounts.

With a growing cloud infrastructure, the Trust was facing an unsustainable cloud spend. Limited resources meant the organisation’s IT team was lacking the tools and time to perform a comprehensive in-house cost optimisation review.

“Our growing spend on cloud had become unmanageable as our team only had limited time and tools at hand. Insight’s Microsoft Azure expertise has saved the Trust roughly £100,000 a year by reviewing our portfolio and identifying unused resources that were adding to our monthly cost.”

Head of IT, NHS Trust

“As a public sector organisation, spending is under constant scrutiny, and therefore, we are thrilled to have made a significant saving. These savings will be reinvested within our organisation to improve efficiencies across the board.” 

Chief Information Officer, NHS Trust

Solution and Outcome

Insight’s Microsoft Azure Consultancy team worked closely with the organisation’s IT department to understand the Trust’s requirements and constraints throughout the project. By analysing its usage of Azure, Insight identified over-provisioned resources and opportunities to implement cost saving plans, as well as highlighting unused resources that were adding to the monthly cost.

After an in-depth review of the tenant, Insight found that several Virtual Machines had been overprovisioned in the earlier stages of adoption, resulting in unnecessary costs. Once optimised, it was recommended that they purchase reserved instances for long-running Virtual Machines. Reserving instances provides a large reduction in costs, compared to the alternative pay-as-you-go model, which the organisation had been operating under.

Once inefficiencies were identified, Insight worked with the Trust to set up FinOps best practices and a cost management plan to reduce spend and provide the tools to proactively manage their tenant costs moving forward.

The healthcare organisation carried out Insight’s recommendations, leading to an average reduction of £100,000 in annual costs, which could then be reinvested in the team to progress working operations.

Why Insight?

As a leading Solutions Integrator, Insight has detailed knowledge of Microsoft’s cloud solutions, including the implementation and management of its Azure suite.

Insight works with over 400 healthcare clients in the UK and has developed a deep understanding of the challenges faced by these organisations. Combined with over a decade of experience of working with NHS and healthcare organisations, Insight was in an excellent position to meet the client’s challenges, optimise spend on cloud infrastructure, and provide the tools needed for the IT team to manage its spend moving forward.

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