Executive summary
With approximately 3,000 cloud accounts across AWS and Azure to manage, FactSet needed more transparency and insight to create a trusted showback/chargeback process, arm engineers with actionable information, and optimize cloud spend. Implementing IBM Cloudability enabled them to replace their internally built cloud cost management application with a proven solution and helped them:
- Increase transparency for cloud spend
- Enable engineers to take action to optimize costs
- Allocate costs for all shared resources
- Double commitment coverage for RDS
- Push toward achieving unit economics
Company overview
FactSet is a financial data and software company headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut. Founded in 1978, the company specializes in solutions for investment professionals, providing them with access to financial data and analytics that help them make business-critical decisions. With 37 locations in 20 countries, FactSet employs over 12,000 people and serves 8,200 client institutions and more than 218,000 investment professionals.
The challenge
Engineering teams are core to FactSet—they create the company’s solutions, test new ideas, and drive innovation. Therefore, reducing barriers to infrastructure and tools is paramount. Access to cloud resources greatly increased the agility of engineering work. Using a micro-account strategy allowed teams to easily create new accounts and quickly get started in a governed and secure way. The cloud environment has now grown to approximately 3,000 accounts, most of them in Amazon Web Services (AWS), making cloud cost management a critical yet challenging activity.
“We needed to understand our cloud spend in order to better manage it. In the data center, if you leave stuff running and it’s not being used, costs get hidden through capitalized purchases of additional hardware that is depreciated over multiple years. But unused/idle resources in the cloud burn cash that directly impacts the bottom line,” said Hitesh Chitalia, VP and Director of Cloud Optimization at FactSet.
To address this challenge, FactSet developed its own purpose-built cloud cost management solution. This application enabled the company to collect cloud spend data, attribute costs across the divisions, and produce reports for finance and operations.
The application helped make sense out of spend data, but it had several drawbacks. For instance, the application was useful as a financial reporting tool, but there was not enough actionable transparency for engineers to take action on cloud spend. The custom application also required a dedicated FactSet engineer to perform ongoing maintenance and feature development.
Given the limitations of their current system and the pressing need to get more data in the hands of engineers, FactSet decided to look for a more capable and feature-rich solution for cloud cost management.
The solution
The search for a replacement for their custom application led FactSet to IBM Cloudability. Several factors set Cloudability apart from competitors, according to Chitalia, especially scalability to handle the amount of import data FactSet needed to support. In addition, Cloudability provided a better UI/UX interface, more robust self-service capability, and natural integration with other solutions within FactSet’s Apptio ecosystem.
“When we first saw IBM Cloudability, we liked it. It checked the majority of the boxes for us,” he said. “The ease of integrating the cloud billing system made it very easy for us to just get started and going on it.”
For FactSet, implementing Cloudability was easy and straightforward, and the solution has helped improve FinOps and cloud operations in many ways.
The results
More transparency enables engineers to take action
IBM Cloudability made it easier for Chitalia to import cloud billing data from all the cloud accounts and maintain groupings by simply linking to the payor account. Once linked, Cloudability imports data and enables FactSet to align costs to divisions, departments, and teams through the solution’s mapping capability.
“Once I have the data, all I have to do is map the accounts in IBM Cloudability, and I can maintain the mapping of those accounts to divisions and the actual engineering teams working on products supported by those accounts,” Chitalia said. “Now, I have data tied to actuals and I can give engineering teams specifically what they are responsible for.”
Cloudability not only helps engineers understand their actual spend but also provides insights on spending trends and recommendations for optimizing resources. This gives them much more information than they previously received from the company’s custom application and has motivated and empowered them to take action to optimize cloud spend.
Better insight for allocation of shared resources
Cloudability provides FactSet with the ability to drill down deeper into the cost drivers of shared resources, giving divisions an opportunity to make decisions that will potentially lower costs across the organization.
“Divisions and engineering teams see line items for shared costs, and they want to know the cost drivers of those line items,” Chitalia said. “They ask ‘What is causing those costs to go up? Is it a network anomaly? Is it inefficient logging to the centralized logging mechanism?’ They are really interested now because of the transparency provided by IBM Cloudability, and they want to see what can be done to drive those costs down. For example, an application making a lot of network IO calls will increase the shared network costs. If the application is updated to reduce those calls, the shared network costs go down, and everyone benefits.”
Doubling RDS commitment coverage
Prior to implementing Cloudability, FactSet purchased reserved instances for EC2 and RDS through scripts offered by the company’s custom application. However, the scripts were not maintained as new instance types were introduced, and there was no transparency into the purchase recommendations the scripts offered. Further, there was no easy way to share information with engineers and platform owners to validate that instances would remain for the duration of the commitment. Should we purchase 1 year or 3 years of commitment?
According to Chitalia, Cloudability has increased the visibility into commitment recommendations, allowing for easy validation of the usage duration and thereby increasing the total coverage, specifically for RDS, helping FactSet take full advantage of discount pricing.
“We went from 40% coverage to 90% coverage for RDS,” he said. “Using IBM Cloudability, I can see when reserved instances (RIs) are about to expire, and I can attribute upfront payments to the accounts where the RI got applied. I can be very specific and that’s something I could not do before. It’s another example of how IBM Cloudability helps with our showback mechanism for centrally-managed costs—we can see who is using RDS and then apply RIs directly to the actuals for those specific accounts.”
Enhanced collaboration with finance and business units
FactSet’s FinOps team has a good, long-standing relationship with the finance team. The adoption of Cloudability has grown and matured that relationship. Finance teams and FinOps agree on terminology and how costs are streamlined and allocated, making the partnership between the groups even stronger.
Cloudability’s increased transparency has helped FinOps foster collaborative partnerships with division leaders and engineering teams, too.
“Engineering leadership loves the transparency we are giving them, and they want more of it,” Chitalia said. “We have matured to where leadership wants their direct reports to be involved in monthly cloud review meetings because they trust the data and are able to see opportunities to take action. They welcome the reporting and want more. In fact, they often ask FinOps to go directly to their teams and talk to them about where spend can be optimized.”
Push toward unit economics
Through increased transparency, Cloudability has helped FactSet continue to mature FinOps and optimize cloud spend in a variety of ways. This includes recommendations for rightsizing cloud services, maximizing compute discounts, and introducing automation for removing unused and orphaned resources. Perhaps most importantly of all, it has given engineers valuable information they never had before to help them make decisions and optimize their cloud spend.
According to Chitalia, IBM Cloudability creates the solid foundation they need for taking the next step in the company’s FinOps journey: the push toward unit economics.
“As FactSet matures and we allocate cloud costs down to a specific product, that’s where unit economics will play a role in helping us make product decisions,” he said. “We’re not there yet, but we expect to get there very soon.”
Compared to their custom tooling, FactSet was able to increase value for every capability of their FinOps practice. Sign up for a personalized demo of IBM Cloudability to see how your organization can increase transparency and optimize your cloud spend.
IBM Apptio
![ApptioCareers-Employee[1]](data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHZpZXdCb3g9IjAgMCAyMjUgMjc1IiB3aWR0aD0iMjI1IiBoZWlnaHQ9IjI3NSIgZGF0YS11PSJodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRnd3dy5hcHB0aW8uY29tJTJGd3AtY29udGVudCUyRnVwbG9hZHMlMkZlbGVtZW50b3IlMkZ0aHVtYnMlMkZBcHB0aW9DYXJlZXJzLUVtcGxveWVlMS1xZzVuenB5MHdoaWJtbzZvdmJqNGM3MHh0aTUzdmo1OHM0endwajh0dHMucG5nIiBkYXRhLXc9IjIyNSIgZGF0YS1oPSIyNzUiIGRhdGEtYmlwPSIiPjwvc3ZnPg== "ApptioCareers-Employee[1]")
