CASE STUDY: Insurance Carrier Benefits From AWS Savings Plans

Blue Sentry Cloud worked with a large residential property insurance carrier to help them save substantially on their AWS footprint. The company, an existing Blue Sentry Cloud managed service client with a large AWS presence, relies on Blue Sentry to monitor and proactively adjust its environment for performance, reliability, and cost optimization.

As a result of this long and mutually beneficial relationship, the client decided to enlist Blue Sentry Cloud’s help in managing a very large migration from on-premise colocation centers into AWS at the end of 2020. Blue Sentry Cloud was able to work with the client and AWS in order to secure funding through the MAP2.0 migration program for that effort. With the additional resource moving to AWS, Blue Sentry Cloud wanted to ensure that the current AWS resources were all running in the most cost-optimized manner possible, and during the monthly cadence call with the MSP team, it was suggested that we review the cost and performance reports that Blue Sentry makes available to all of our MSP customers.  

Getting Started

To initiate the cost-saving process, Blue Sentry Cloud worked with the client’s management team to analyze all metrics and finalize a right sizing plan for newer, recently migrated resources. Though the client had previously benefited from using reserved instances, they were hesitant to use them now. Even though convertible RIs can promote ease and help to manage risk, they simply weren’t sure if they wanted to make the sizing commitment. 

After discussion with the Blue Sentry team, it was decided to stop using RIs and to start using Savings Plans, but with one caveat: They would not be used in an account with compute resources because of the way Savings Plans are applied to resources.  As a result, it was decided to set up a separate account as an empty master account and to move all existing accounts under this new account. In this manner, the Savings Plan could be attributed to compute resources in the most efficient way possible, while saving the customer the most amount of money.

Big Savings

The first benefit came immediately following the initial right-sizing effort.  By resizing 29 instances in the targeted account, Blue Sentry Cloud was able to immediately reduce the bill for that account by nearly $2,000. Additionally, all GP2 ENS volumes were migrated to GP3 volumes, saving an additional $524.32 per month  Once management was satisfied that everything in the target account was right-sized, Blue Sentry Cloud guided the client in purchasing a Savings Plan for the master account.

After implementing the Savings Plan and letting the dust settle, the client realized a 24 percent decrease in spend for the target account — reducing their monthly bill from $75,000 to $57,000. Today, Blue Sentry Cloud continues to monitor and optimize the company’s AWS environment to ensure the right balance of cost, performance, reliability, and stability.