How Open Financial used Cloud Cost Observability to achieve a 30% reduction in costs
Year
Open is a connected banking platform for business payments that simplifies the process of sending, receiving, and reconciling payments for businesses. With Open, businesses can connect their bank accounts and accounting software like Tally, Zoho Books and more, to send and receive payments and reconcile their payment transactions.
Industry
Region
Key Features
Cloud Optimization, Cloud Visibility, Recommendations
Introduction
One of the largest industries depending on the power and capability of the cloud is FinTech.
Fintech companies are using the cloud to overhaul traditional solutions, making user experiences better, transactions faster, and fees lower. This rapid change often leads to new business models like peer-to-peer lending and no-frills digital banking. The cloud plays a crucial role in driving these new features forward, and delivering experiences that foster stickiness and the path of least faults, especially in the financial sector. There is a huge focus on how leading players in FinTech and cloud computing work together to create a new status quo, and the engagement between Open Financial Technologies and Amnic is a prime example.
Challenges Faced
As one of India’s fastest growing FinTech companies, delivering unmatched customer experiences was critical to staying ahead of the competitive market. Open Financial wanted to ensure their customers were able to use their platform without disruptions or significant challenges. While keeping their infrastructure running smoothly expended heavily on the cloud, surging costs of their cloud infrastructure was also a point of concern for the team navigating between the two imminent necessities.
While considering solutions that can help them manage their cloud costs better, the team at Open Financial engaged with Amnic in a POC to explore the feasibility of the solution.
“While we understood that our cloud costs were a challenge, the extent of how much we could optimize it and run a lean infrastructure was still in the dark. We wanted to find a solution that could easily be implemented to break our costs down and give us a clearer picture the costs associated at the various service levels and what can be done to manage our overall cloud spends”
Ajeesh Achuthan
Co-Founder & CTO, Open Financial
Solution
The simplicity of Amnic’s solution allowed the team to connect their infrastructure and gain visibility into costs in under 24 hours. As a FinTech company, the added bonus of Amnic’s platform being SOC2, GDPR and ISO:20001 compliant also eased the process of deployment and alleviated security concerns.
Amnic delivered simplified views into the costs around various AWS services, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, EBS volumes, and storage snapshots. Open Financial was able to gain greater overall visibility and recommendations for optimization and resource allocation. Amnic delivered tangible value across key areas such as :
Visibility Across AWS Services: Open Financial gained comprehensive visibility into their AWS usage. This granular visibility into the various services allowed them to identify areas of potential inefficiency and overspending.
Optimal Instance Type Recommendations: The astute recommendations delivered by Amnic’s cloud cost observability platform delivered insights to Open Financial on the optimal EC2 instance types and RDS configurations tailored to their workload requirements, ensuring efficient resource utilization.
Optimization of EBS Volumes using GP3: The recommendations by Amnic steered Open Financial to optimize their EBS volumes by migrating to the cost-effective GP3 volume type, matching performance requirements while reducing storage costs.
Storage Snapshots Optimizations: The depth of visibility and analysis through Amnic’s helped understand storage snapshot usage patterns. Open Financial implemented optimizations to reduce unnecessary snapshots and associated costs, without compromising data integrity or availability.
Savings Plan and RI Recommendations: Open Financial received recommendations for the utilization of AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RI), enabling them to capitalize on cost savings opportunities through upfront commitments.
Results
30% Reduction in Overall Cloud Costs
By using Amnic, Open Financial achieved a remarkable 30% reduction in cloud expenditure. This was driven by a myriad of factors that included visibility, analysis and proactive optimization measures that were guided by cloud cost observability insights. Today, Amnic has become an integral part of the overall cloud toolchain for Open Financial, who are deeply engaged with the cloud cost observability platform to manage their costs better.
“Using Amnic has been nothing short of transformational. The platform is able to analyze our cloud costs at a depth that would take us several hours, if not days to understand better. We are able to spend a few hours each week and save costs that run into thousands of dollars, but what’s more impressive is how Amnic has become an integral part of our cloud toolchain and maintaining a lean and efficient infrastructure.”
Ajeesh Achuthan
Co-Founder & CTO, Open Financial
The ability to visualize and analyze cloud costs has given Open Financial the edge to stay ahead of unexpected surges in spends. Amnic’s cloud cost observability platform was not only able to understand their costs better, but bring in a system of continually monitoring costs, managing spends and simplifying infrastructure efficiency.
