ENGAGEMENT
The Cloud Engineering team of a Fortune 50 Communications & Media company engaged DayBlink Consulting for support in developing a public-cloud-like experience that could automatically create, remove and shift workloads across its infrastructure. It sought help with collecting design requirements from stakeholders across its organization to build a UI and APIs that integrated with existing VMWare infrastructure.
PROBLEM
Our client’s public cloud spend was growing shockingly unbounded. Its multi-cloud environment incurred steep costs driven by the complex billing structures of multiple cloud providers, numerous accounts within each organization, unpredictable usage patterns and the lack of optimized resource management across hundreds of applications. Additionally, despite their substantial size and capabilities, their private cloud options: were lacking features needed for non-technical users, were behind by several version releases and were already over-subscribed.
SOLUTION
To address these challenges, DayBlink Consulting led the effort to design a modern private cloud solution that combined the features, ease of use and efficiency of public cloud environments with the cost benefits of owning private infrastructure. In an essential partnership with a 3rd party technology provider, the client was pioneering this first-of-its-kind private cloud solution. To ensure the vendor delivered an acceptable solution, we defined detailed requirements working across numerous application teams as well as key stakeholders from security, engineering and finance. With those inputs, we worked with the vendor to design a full-stack solution featuring a user-friendly interface, allowing dev and product teams to deploy and manage workloads easily (akin to the simplicity of public cloud platforms). We also designed infrastructure automation to orchestrate workload distribution across physical hardware to ensure the private cloud operated with the flexibility and convenience typically associated with public clouds. Finally, we collaborated with major infrastructure vendors to design supply-chain processes for future expansions.
RESULT
Over the following 5 year period, our client anticipated a 50% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with a far more predictable cost forecast. Beyond the substantial savings, the new private cloud provided a public-like on-premises solution that was modular, scalable and more-easily-tailored to the needs of their individual teams. The solution’s optimized supply chain for infrastructure delivery enabled our client to add capacity in under 45 days. Finally, the client reported excitement around the new solution as part of the efforts to establish a new “cloud culture”.