Caylent Team
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Data Modernization & Analytics
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Improving Financial Insights with Amazon QuickSight at a Fortune 500 Network Hardware Company
Data Modernization & Analytics
Learn how an enterprise network hardware company gained granular financial insights and improved business operations with a cloud-based reporting solution.
Client Overview
An enterprise network hardware company is a global leader in high-performance networking and security solutions, delivering routers, switches, and cloud-ready infrastructure that support secure, scalable, and reliable networks for enterprises, service providers, and cloud operators. Their offerings enable the development of AI-native, automated networks that drive digital transformation and simplified user experiences across industries.
Challenge
The Enterprise Network Hardware Company faced significant obstacles in gaining necessary financial visibility into their AWS usage.
- Data Aggregation Problem: The Enterprise Network Hardware Company was prevented from leveraging their preferred AWS Organizations model for managing multiple accounts, which made it difficult to aggregate billing data upstream.
- Lack of Granular Insight: The default CUDOS (Cloud Utilization and Operations Dashboard) workshop installation did not provide adequate insights into the range of AWS services they were using. Furthermore, it lacked the necessary granularity and insights required by their management team.
- Business Need: The fundamental requirement was to improve business processes to gain better financial insights.
Solution & Architecture
A cohesive reporting architecture was implemented to overcome data visibility challenges and integrate seamlessly with existing tooling.
- Architecture: The solution utilizes Amazon S3, AWS Glue, and Amazon Athena. Data from each individual AWS account is aggregated into a single Amazon S3 bucket, leveraging a previously implemented comprehensive tagging strategy. AWS Glue then crawls this aggregated data, and Amazon Athena queries are designed to provide the specific data required for the QuickSight dashboard reporting.
- Integration: Rather than creating an entirely new dashboard, the new analyses were integrated directly into the existing CUDOS deployment.
- Scope Expansion: This integration expanded the scope of visibility beyond the CUDOS initial EC2-centric implementation, providing details on a wider range of AWS services and offering deeper insights into the areas and types of spending on AWS.
Results
The Amazon QuickSight solution successfully transformed cost visibility, providing management with real-time, actionable financial intelligence.
- Deeper Financial Insight: The Amazon QuickSight Dashboard serves as the primary Business Intelligence (BI) tool for gaining deeper insights into the utilization of AWS services, features, and their associated costs.
- Drill-Down Capabilities: Insights are available starting at the organizational level and can be drilled down in real-time to specific application or business unit costing groups.
- Comprehensive Reporting: The dashboard provides the ability to drill down at the project, team, initiative, account, or service type level to understand exactly what services are being used and their corresponding charges to the organization.
- TCO Analysis: A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis was completed and delivered to the client.
Key Takeaway
Tagging as the Foundation: The successful utilization of a robust enterprise tagging strategy, coupled with the insights provided through the Cost and Usage Report (CUR), empowers the client to realize real-time costing data per application, business unit, or logical infrastructure grouping.
Data Modernization & Analytics
Caylent Team
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