Codify helps Michael Hill keep cloud costs down

Azure specialist cloud services provider Codify provided Michael Hill Australia with cloud optimisation services that helped the company avoid a 22 percent increase in cloud costs.

The jewellery retailer traditionally operated primarily through brick and mortar stores in Australia but, like all retailers, had to transition to a digital-forward approach at the outset of the pandemic.

The company improved its ecommerce offerings and added a click-and-collect functionality, as well as deploying Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for internal teams.

“At the start of the pandemic, we took immediate steps to bolster our digital channels to customers, quickly adding cloud capacity and costs across our IT infrastructure,” said Michael Hill CIO Matt Keays.

The retailer then looked to Codify to help mitigate the rising costs brought about by their rising ‘reactive’ cloud environment.

Codify staff undertook an array of work to reduce usage by the virtual machines by cleaning up excess resource-consuming ephemera including any leftovers from deleted VMs, unneeded backups, certain unattached resources and gaining the best value from its subscriptions.

They also optimised Michael Hill’s workloads by pooling databases, improving network architecture, properly configured point-in-time recovery of data, and changed data storage from hot to archive tiers.

Codify’s team also compared the retailer's consumption costs with its average consumption model to identify where spending is high compared to other clients, and they implemented the company’s proprietary platform that can automatically identify potential overruns.

“Thanks to the professional focus and added transparency of our cloud ops by teaming internal DEVSECOPS with Codify, we avoided cost hikes of over 22 percent,” stated Keays.

“The opportunities identified by Codify went deeper than most evergreen strategies, enabling us to reinvest considerable savings back into our digital growth strategy and rely on Codify’s strong Azure capabilities as we focused on delivering integrated applications.”

Codify director Ben Parker added, “We’ve seen a lot of companies rapidly expanding their cloud requirements, particularly due to the pandemic, which often leads to the need for extensive Dev-Test environments.

“Now that most companies have adjusted to the new normal, it’s the right time to review and optimise their cloud environment, particularly with the type of one-time actions available that we have identified.”