Healthcare Company Optimizes Cloud Costs in Preparation for Growth

A leading healthcare company experienced rising cloud costs as its operations expanded across Azure and Databricks environments. Despite utilizing platform management tools, the company found it challenging to correlate cloud spending with specific business functions, making cost control difficult.

To address this, the company partnered with Wavicle to gain better visibility into cost drivers and identify opportunities for optimizing cloud usage. Wavicle provided a set of well-evaluated recommendations along with a value analytics model designed to improve cloud spending. The company has confirmed that the recommendations, once implemented, are expected to reduce cloud costs by 15%, with additional savings opportunities identified and currently under evaluation.

Identifying cost drivers and operational inefficiencies

As the healthcare company scaled its operations, cloud costs within its Microsoft Azure and Databricks environment increased significantly. The reporting tools they relied on only offered high-level insights, so it was hard to tell which services or activities drove the biggest expenses.

Azure resources were missing proper tags, which meant the company could not link cloud spending to specific departments or projects. In addition, teams across the company had different levels of cloud knowledge, so understanding overall usage and spending was even more difficult. This mix of limited tools, unclear tagging, and uneven cloud knowledge made cost optimization a serious challenge.

To better manage its cloud expenses, the company partnered with Wavicle to gain greater visibility into its usage and receive effective cost management recommendations.

Strategic cloud cost optimization approach

Wavicle conducted a 10-week engagement to assess the company’s Azure and Databricks environments. This involved a thorough analysis of cloud consumption, service cost structures, resource utilization, application dependencies, and alignment with business objectives.

To begin, Wavicle’s cloud experts created a complete inventory of the company’s existing configurations. They evaluated performance metrics, architectural alignment, and business relevance to identify inefficiencies. Based on the findings, they formulated a set of optimization recommendations.

Each recommendation was prioritized based on its potential impact, associated risks, and feasibility. To ensure long-term value, the team also examined each recommendation against architectural principles such as performance, scalability, flexibility, privacy, and technical debt. This approach ensured that the cloud environment would remain robust, adaptable, and cost-efficient.

To ensure alignment with business needs, Wavicle worked closely with internal stakeholders and Databricks partners to validate each recommendation. Educational sessions were also conducted to equip teams with the knowledge needed for effective cost management.

Next, Wavicle developed a value analytics model to better support ongoing cost management. This tool will provide continuous visibility into cost contributors across business units and Azure service areas. It is expected to help the company better connect usage patterns with business outcomes and forecast future consumption more accurately.

Overall, Wavicle assisted the healthcare company in gaining the visibility needed to make more informed decisions and take actionable steps toward reducing cloud costs. This engagement not only addressed immediate cost concerns but also laid the foundation for sustained cost management and optimization.

A foundation for reliable cloud cost management

The healthcare company has validated Wavicle’s recommendations and expects to achieve an immediate 15% reduction in monthly cloud costs upon implementation. Additional savings opportunities have been identified and are currently under assessment to evaluate their broader cost impact.

By following architectural best practices throughout the engagement, Wavicle has ensured that the recommendations optimize costs and improve the scalability, efficiency, and resilience of the company’s Azure and Databricks infrastructure.

Ongoing collaboration between the company’s internal teams, Wavicle, and Databricks partners was key to aligning with changing business goals. This teamwork helped refine the optimization efforts and focus on the most impactful recommendations.

The value analytics model will also enable continuous monitoring of cloud costs, giving the company the visibility to manage resources more effectively as the optimization process moves forward.

Beyond the immediate 15% savings, Wavicle also recommended additional optimizations across core Databricks workloads such as storage, SQL, app service, and log analytics. These represent near-term opportunities for further cost reduction.

Overall, Wavicle has provided the healthcare company with the tools, insights, and guidance needed to manage cloud costs more effectively and work toward long-term savings.