Achieve 99% Compliance and 5,000% ROI with Automated AWS Tagging
Read how a strategic collaboration with GSPANN streamlined a company’s AWS EC2 resource management and established a model for sustainable, cost-effective cloud infrastructure practices that the company can replicate across other areas of its global technology landscape.
The Client
A multinational sporting goods company.
The Challenge
The company faced compliance issues with its tagging standards across multiple AWS accounts, particularly those used by its digital technology teams. The company’s stakeholders also sought to build or upgrade pipelines for AWS EC2 instances. Given the scale of the company’s cloud operations, which involve extensive use of AWS EC2 instances, efficient management of these resources was crucial for financial optimization and compliance with internal governance.
In brief, the company wanted to:
- Merge existing tagging systems into a unified approach that ensures all EC2 instances are appropriately tagged with mandatory tags according to the company’s corporate standards.
- Automate the tagging process to ensure all new EC2 instances are automatically compliant upon deployment.
- Implement rigorous validation checks to prevent and rectify misconfigurations or untagged resources.
- Develop a sustainable model that integrates seamlessly with the existing CI/CD pipelines and cloud infrastructure.
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The Solution
GSPANN partnered with company engineers to implement a comprehensive cloud asset tagging strategy to optimize costs, improve accountability and ownership, and enhance resource allocation and AWS EC2 instance management. The solution focused on ensuring sustainable best practices through automated tagging and validation processes, ultimately leading to significant cost savings and operational efficiencies for AWS resources and services. We estimate the ROI for this program to be in the range of 250 to 5,000% (depending on assumptions).
Here are the key points of the project:
- Integration of Tag Enforcement in CI/CD Pipelines: We integrated tagging enforcement mechanisms in the company’s existing CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins and CloudFormation. This ensured that any new instance launched would automatically comply with the tagging policies, thereby preventing non-compliance from the outset.
- Daily Compliance Monitoring and Reporting: Utilizing CloudRed’s reporting capabilities, our engineers established a daily routine of generating and reviewing compliance reports. This proactive approach helped identify and address tagging discrepancies in real-time.
- Engagement with Instance Owners: To maintain high levels of compliance, the project team regularly communicated with EC2 instance owners and the distribution lists associated with the instances, providing them with the necessary support to meet tagging standards. This included custom solutions for ephemeral instances that frequently change and may escape standard tagging protocols.
- Automated Tag Value Validation: The team implemented CloudRed’s tag validation features to ensure that only approved, meaningful tag values were used across the board, further automating the compliance process and reducing manual oversight.
Business Impact
- Increased Compliance: The tagging compliance rate improved dramatically from 94% to 99.3% across all targeted accounts, surpassing the project’s initial goals. Many groups at the company still hover at 60-70% of compliance at the time of writing.
- Cost Optimization: By ensuring proper tagging, the company can now accurately attribute costs to specific departments and projects, leading to more informed budgeting decisions and driving toward significant cost savings.
- Operational Efficiency: Automated tagging and validations have reduced the workload on the company’s cloud teams, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine maintenance.
- Massive ROI: Assuming a monthly cost of $100/EC2 instance, 1,000 instances, and a conservative 10% cost saving, the ROI for this program is 253% over 24 months. Assuming a monthly cost of $500/EC2 instance, 1,000 instances, and a more significant 30% cost saving, the ROI for this program is an astounding 5,000% over the same period.
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