Bodø Kommune

Cloud optimization brings some down-to-earth benefits of 50% cost savings

In the world of IT, cost optimization is a crucial factor for any organization, and Bodø Kommune, a municipality in northern Norway, is no exception. Bodø municipality is a 1,395-square-kilometer-sized area in the Arctic Circle in Norway, with a wide range of activities and responsibilities. From roads, wastewater, and drainage to public transport, planning applications, and municipal buildings, it is a long list. Bodø is also responsible for culture, welfare, sport, and local policy so it’s fair to say it’s accountable for practically every aspect of Norwegian life.

Over a number of years, Bodø had been looking for ways to decrease its costs and increase efficiencies and decided to embark on a project that would ultimately create far-reaching savings. “When the option came to move into the cloud, we had to work with an IT services partner as we do not have our own people to do the job," says Bjørn Inge Furunes Senior Advisor, Bodø Kommune. The municipality, a Microsoft enterprise customer, had already outsourced its IT services.

First, Bodø decided to migrate its on-premises servers to Azure. Migration to Azure can have many benefits; not least that it’s an opportunity to get rid of resources that are costing money, energy, and carbon footprint, and are serving no useful purpose. “Our primary motivation was to save money,” says Furunes.

The benefits of migrating an IT infrastructure to the cloud are not only related to reduce the maintenance of the organization’s physical servers and network – it is about enabling the organization to scale faster and respond to changes in a more agile way.

After a few months into the project, however, it became clear that the project required some very particular skills, so the municipality turned to SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon), a global leader in IT and digital transformation services to optimize its cloud estate through its FinOps Service. SoftwareOne had been working with Bodø Kommune for several years as its License Service Provider (LSP).

Financial accountability

In the initial phase of the optimization process, and to ensure Bodø municipality utilizes the cloud in the best possible way, SoftwareOne located and deleted 75 unattached disks and rightsized its VMs, as well as activated AHB (reusing on-premises licenses in the cloud) on Windows and SQL VMs. Unattached disks are often associated with a deleted virtual machine, and when a virtual machine is deleted, the corresponding unattached disk needs to be removed as well. After this process, SoftwareOne also helped Bodø commit to one- and three-year reservations on VMs, which alone saved Bodø around 1,5 million NOK yearly.

During the migration, this aspect had failed to be picked up, but getting rid of them as part of the optimization process had a significant impact in reducing costs – 50% cost reduction in Azure. This translated to a yearly cost reduction of around 5 million NOK (approx. USD 474,000). “If we had not made this saving, we would have seen yearly Azure spend in the region of 8-9 million NOK,” comments Furunes.

In its second analysis, SoftwareOne found an additional 17% savings (including another 16 unattached disks), representing 110,000 NOK. While this may seem like a smaller number compared to the first report, it was a testament to the success of the FinOps project. SoftwareOne consultants had been working so closely with Bodø Kommune between the first and second reports that many of the potential savings had already been realized.

As in any optimization project, the work is not one-off but a continuous process. So, in parallel to the optimization, SoftwareOne recommended Bodø Kommune to begin the job of creating and enforcing rules and management principles that will ensure that consumption remains optimal in the future. It also suggested tagging the environment so that down the line, a showback exercise can be conducted. Here, the municipality will be able to determine which departments have the highest cloud consumption and it will pinpoint certain areas to investigate whether even more savings can be made.