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Stopping cloud sprawl: How a marketing company cut costs and improved security

Custom solutions to achieve your goals

Together Toward Tomorrow

How a financial services firm saved $900K via cloud modernization

3 steps to optimize cloud spend

Technology industry: Migrating on-premises systems to AWS cloud

At a glance

The gradual and disorganized growth of a marketing company’s Google Cloud Platform environment had created several operational and governance issues. Leadership was also dealing with major security risks due to software vulnerabilities, overly permissive network access and untested disaster recovery plans. Meanwhile, the company’s Amazon Web Services environment struggled with cost transparency and efficiency. Lacking a proper FinOps operating model, teams were unable to find and manage cost drivers and opportunities for AWS. Using expertise in both platforms, a Kforce team created a full picture of the cloud environment and a list of recommendations to fix inconsistent architecture, financial inefficiencies, security vulnerabilities and disorganized cloud sprawl.

INDUSTRY Media, communications & entertainment KEY SOLUTIONS Cloud migration; FinOps; Security and governance; Architecture; Hybrid/multi-cloud KEY TECHNOLOGIES Google Cloud Platform (GCP); Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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Jason Ashabran

MEET THE TEAM

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Chadd Schwartz

SR. DIR. SOLUTIONS DELIVERY

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William Lockley

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Challenges

When Kforce began the project, the company’s GCP environment had expanded into a range of services, including Compute Engine virtual machines and Google Kubernetes Engine container orchestration. It also included Cloud Run and App Engine serverless platforms, along with managed services by Cloud Storage and BigQuery. While these efforts enabled innovation and speed, they also prevented executives from getting a transparent view of the cloud’s architecture health and operational resilience. Lacking the in-house GCP expertise needed to untangle the cloud sprawl, the company’s cloud spending kept rising while financial accountability and governance fell behind.

Inconsistent cloud architecture and governance

Because architectural decisions were distributed across teams, leaders lacked confidence in their ability to assess platform-level risk. Questions about fault tolerance, incident response readiness and operational ownership couldn’t be answered consistently across environments.

Operational risk and limited visibility

Workloads in GCP were designed and deployed by multiple teams using different architectural approaches. Core best practices were applied unevenly, such as standardized identity and access management, environment segmentation, resiliency planning and operational monitoring.

Even though the company wasn’t dealing with cloud sprawl in their AWS environment, they didn’t have a FinOps operating model in place. This meant there was no clear way for the engineering, finance and leadership teams to work together on forecasting, governing or optimizing cloud costs. Instead, everyone tackled cost issues as they popped up and relied on ad hoc reviews. Because of this, they often missed out on discounts that could have helped.

Missed cost savings

Solutions

Partnering with Kforce, the company ran two assessments: one for GCP and the other for AWS. The GCP assessment focused on architecture, security, best practices and financial analysis. With AWS, the concentration centered on FinOps, with financial analyses run on reserved instances, licensing and resource sizing to find cost savings. Kforce designed several solutions for the company that balanced near-term risk reduction with long term maturity. After talking with the company about its needs, Kforce crafted solutions that provided leadership with clarity, financial discipline, risk reduction and a sustainable cloud growth operating model.

Standardized GCP architecture and governance foundation

Kforce proposed formalizing a set of cloud architecture standards to establish clear, repeatable patterns for how environments should be built, secured and operated going forward. This included recommendations to standardize network segmentation between environments, strengthen identity access management controls, and ensure that logging and monitoring were consistently enabled across workloads. A list of security recommendations based on the client’s available tools was created, focusing on urgent steps to lower risk.

Kforce recommended strengthening operational excellence by clarifying ownership models and improving system health visibility. This helped reduce uncertainty around who owned issues and how quickly teams could respond when problems occurred. It included providing clearer accountability for environments and services, ensuring that monitoring, alerting and logging were consistently implemented and actionable.

Improved operational resilience through clear ownership and observability

Introduced a formal FinOps operating model for AWS

Kforce proposed moving from ad hoc cost optimization for AWS to a structured FinOps model that aligned engineering, finance and business stakeholders. This included improving tagging standards and enhancing cost reporting for product and application owners. All recommendations were categorized into immediate, near-term and long-term priorities and explained which tools and controls to use, why they were appropriate and the scenarios where they’d deliver the most value. In addition, regular review cadences were established to evaluate usage, forecasts and optimization opportunities.

Rightsized infrastructure and eliminated inefficient consumption patterns

Kforce reviewed usage patterns and suggested specific ways to optimize the AWS infrastructure, especially for computing and storage resources that were not being fully used. Recommendations included adjusting instance sizes, reducing extra storage capacity and matching usage habits with cost-effective pricing options like reservations or savings plans.

Provided an executive-ready roadmap instead of isolated fixes

Across both AWS and GCP, Kforce proposed consolidating findings into a single roadmap for leadership to guide investment and sequencing decisions. Recommendations would be grouped by risk, impact and effort, making it easier for executives to understand tradeoffs and timing. The team also created a cost summary and analysis identifying the primary drivers of costs and inefficiencies. They also made a detailed resource inventory that covered all the infrastructure supporting business-critical applications, including computing, storage and supporting services.

Project outcomes

The Kforce team’s discoveries gave the company’s leaders the data-driven insights they needed to reduce their ballooning cloud costs by 14% per month.

potential reduction in monthly AWS spend was identified through modeled FinOps scenarios, driven by rightsizing, discount instruments and lifecycle policies.

14%

projected savings from more cost-effective EMR workload processing.

60%

projected savings from improved object storage and data management practices.

25%

43 AWS virtual machines analyzed as part of a single application FinOps assessment, providing a granular view of utilization, cost drivers and optimization levers.

Risk visibility and prioritization

The team replaced uncertainty around risks, inefficiencies and gaps in both the cloud architecture and FinOps with evidence-based insights. Company leaders can now make informed decisions about cloud strategy, instead of relying on assumptions or incomplete data.

Financial transparency and shared accountability

The assessments surfaced previously unknown security and governance gaps, ranked by severity for disciplined and defensible risk management decisions. Leadership can now see which issues require immediate attention versus those that could be addressed over time.

Clarity and confidence in cloud decision making

Strategic alignment of cloud platforms

The GCP assessment showed the client where it lacked the expertise and governance needed to operate a platform at scale. This clarity informed broader cloud platform consolidation decisions, reducing operational complexity and improving long-term manageability.

The FinOps review turned cloud usage data into clear and practical information, helping both finance and engineering teams see exactly what drove costs and where savings were possible. This common understanding laid the groundwork for more productive conversations about tradeoffs between cost, performance and scalability.

3 steps to optimize cloud spend

How a financial services firm saved $900K via cloud modernization

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