The situation
Our client is a B2B enterprise that had grown quickly, the kind of growth where the product succeeds faster than the infrastructure underneath it can keep up. Their platform processed increasing volumes of customer data every quarter, and the environment that had carried them through the early years was now the single biggest risk to the next stage.
Two problems were compounding. The cloud bill was climbing every month with no clear line between spend and value, over-provisioned instances left running around the clock, orphaned storage, and no reserved-capacity strategy. At the same time, the architecture was straining: a largely single-region, manually managed setup that struggled to handle peak data loads and had no real headroom for the growth the sales team was signing.
Underneath both was a compliance and security gap they couldn't carry into enterprise deals. Larger customers were beginning to ask hard questions about data encryption, access controls, and resilience, and the answers weren't good enough to close the deals waiting on them.
"We'd outgrown our own setup. The bill kept going up, the platform kept getting more fragile, and every serious prospect wanted security answers we couldn't confidently give. We needed all three fixed at once."
VP Engineering, Confidential B2B EnterpriseThe infrastructure review
Led by our systems architecture and security specialists, we began with a full review of the existing environment, cost, architecture, and security examined together rather than as separate projects. What we found:
- Cost: roughly 40% of compute spend went to over-provisioned or idle resources; no Savings Plans or Reserved Instances; no tagging, so no one could attribute spend to a team or feature.
- Scalability: a single-region deployment with vertically scaled instances that hit ceilings under peak load, and manual deploys that made scaling slow and risky.
- Resilience: no automated failover, limited backups, and a recovery process that existed mostly in one engineer's head.
- Security: inconsistent encryption at rest, over-broad IAM permissions, secrets stored in config, and no centralised audit logging.
- Readiness: no load or failure testing, capacity limits were discovered in production, during incidents.
Before and after
- Cloud bill rising every month, unattributed
- ~40% of compute over-provisioned or idle
- Single-region, manually scaled deployment
- No automated failover or tested recovery
- Inconsistent encryption, over-broad IAM
- No load or failure testing before launch
- 38% lower monthly spend, held by governance
- Right-sized, auto-scaled containerised services
- Multi-AZ deployment with 4× peak headroom
- Automated failover and tested DR runbooks
- Encryption everywhere, least-privilege IAM
- Load & chaos testing gating every release
What we built
1. A migration & optimization strategy, costed first
Before touching production, we produced a migration plan that put a dollar figure on every change, what it would cost to run, what it would save, and how much risk it removed. This let leadership approve the work on a clear ROI basis rather than on faith, and gave us a baseline to measure against once the environment was live.
2. Containerisation on Docker with auto-scaling
We containerised the platform's services with Docker and moved them onto an orchestrated, auto-scaling AWS environment. Right-sizing removed the over-provisioning; auto-scaling meant the platform expanded to meet peak data loads and contracted when demand fell, so the client stopped paying around the clock for capacity they used a few hours a day. Peak-load headroom went to 4× without a corresponding rise in baseline cost.
3. A hardened, multi-AZ, resilient architecture
We moved the deployment across multiple availability zones with automated failover, managed backups, and documented, tested disaster-recovery runbooks. Uptime rose from 99.2% to 99.98%, the difference between hours of unplanned downtime a month and minutes a year, and recovery stopped depending on any single person's knowledge.
4. Security & encryption frameworks
Security was rebuilt as a foundation, not a patch. We established encryption at rest and in transit across the estate, moved secrets into a managed vault, rewrote IAM around least-privilege roles, and turned on centralised audit logging and monitoring. The controls were mapped to SOC 2 and the client's data-protection obligations, giving sales concrete, defensible answers to enterprise security reviews.
5. Cost governance that keeps savings permanent
To stop the bill creeping back up, we locked in Savings Plans against the new steady-state baseline, implemented full resource tagging with per-team cost attribution, and set budget alerts and anomaly detection so spend spikes surface immediately. Optimisation became a standing process instead of a one-time cleanup.
"They didn't just cut the bill, they gave us an architecture we can grow into and a security story we can actually take into enterprise deals. The savings have held for two quarters."
VP Engineering, Confidential B2B EnterpriseThe engagement timeline
The tech stack
Results at 6 months
- Monthly cloud spend: −38%, sustained across two quarters
- Uptime: 99.98% (up from 99.2%) on a multi-AZ, auto-failover architecture
- Peak-load headroom: 4× the previous ceiling, auto-scaled
- Security: encryption at rest and in transit, least-privilege IAM, centralised audit logging
- Compliance: controls mapped to SOC 2 and data-protection obligations, unblocking enterprise deals
- Governance: full cost attribution, Savings Plans, and anomaly alerts keeping spend in check
The client came to us with three problems, cost, fragility, and security, that most teams would have treated as three separate projects. Solving them together produced an infrastructure that is cheaper to run today and ready for the growth they're signing tomorrow.