Retail Giant Cuts Cloud Costs by 42% with FinOps
A major GCC retailer reduced annual cloud spend by 42% — saving over $1.2M — through WinCap’s FinOps programme, without sacrificing performance or availability.
The Challenge
After a rapid cloud expansion during COVID-19, the retailer’s AWS bill had grown 4x in two years with no corresponding business justification. Multiple teams were provisioning independently with no tagging, no budgets, and no visibility into waste. Leadership demanded a 30% cost reduction without impacting the e-commerce platform’s performance.
AWS spend had grown 4x with no governance or accountability
Zero cost attribution — no one knew which team spent what
70% of EC2 instances running at less than 20% average utilization
No reserved instance or savings plan coverage
Quick Facts
- Industry
- Retail
- Client
- Confidential
- Location
- UAE
- Key Result
- 42%
Cost Reduction
Our Approach
Implemented a tagging strategy across all AWS resources, set up AWS Cost Explorer dashboards per business unit, and established weekly cost review cadence.
Analyzed 90 days of CloudWatch metrics to right-size EC2, RDS, and ElastiCache instances. Terminated orphaned EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, and idle load balancers.
Purchased Compute Savings Plans for baseline workloads and Reserved Instances for predictable databases, covering 65% of steady-state compute.
Deployed automated shutdown schedules for non-production environments, budget alerts at 50/80/100% thresholds, and anomaly detection rules.
Results
AWS Cost Explorer
Custom dashboards per business unit with cost anomaly detection and automated alerting.
Compute Savings Plans
Covering 65% of baseline compute with flexible commitment-based pricing across instance families.
Automated Scheduling
Non-production environment shutdown schedules saving 14 hours per day per environment.
AWS Organizations SCPs
Service control policies enforcing mandatory tagging and preventing unapproved resource provisioning.
Results & Impact
42%
Cost Reduction
Annual cloud spend reduced from $2.9M to $1.7M
$1.2M
Annual Savings
Realized in the first 12 months
100%
Resource Tagging
Full cost attribution across all business units
0%
Performance Impact
All SLAs maintained or improved
“We went from ‘who’s spending what?’ to a fully governed FinOps practice in 3 months. The savings paid for the entire engagement within the first quarter.”
VP of Technology
Major GCC Retailer
Key Takeaway
FinOps isn’t about cutting corners — it’s about making every cloud dollar intentional. Visibility, right-sizing, and commitment-based pricing consistently deliver 30–40% savings for enterprises that haven’t optimized.
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