$1.8M saved without sacrificing cloud performance.
How Liaison reduced AWS spend by 40% while maintaining 100% uptime and preserving the ability to handle 10× traffic spikes.
Liaison International provides higher-education admissions management solutions used by more than 1,000 programs worldwide and processes millions of applications each year.
The cyclical nature of admissions creates sharp demand peaks and immovable deadlines, making scalability, performance and availability business-critical.
The business challenge
Reduce AWS spend without creating operational risk.
Growth and complex infrastructure had increased cloud costs. Aggressive cost reduction could not come at the expense of the reliability and performance required during peak admissions periods. Three objectives had to be met together.
Reduce infrastructure cost
Identify and eliminate overprovisioning, inefficient commitments, unnecessary storage and licensing waste across the AWS environment.
Protect critical availability
Admissions deadlines meant downtime was not an acceptable trade-off for savings. Optimization decisions had to preserve service continuity.
Maintain elastic performance
The environment needed to keep handling significant traffic spikes while delivering a responsive experience when it mattered most.
The skie.io approach
Treating cost, performance and commitments as one system.
Rightsizing, infrastructure selection, commitments, licensing, storage and governance were evaluated together, so savings in one area would not create inefficiency or risk elsewhere.
Rightsizing and resource selection
Utilization analyzed to identify overprovisioned instances and align configurations with actual workload requirements without reducing performance.
Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
Workload patterns reviewed to build a balanced commitment portfolio, maximizing discounts while managing underutilization risk.
License optimization
Licensed database services and deployment models assessed for opportunities, including bring-your-own-license configurations where appropriate.
Storage optimization
Unused and infrequently accessed EBS volumes identified, volume types aligned with usage, and S3 lifecycle policies applied.
Cost governance and alerts
Real-time dashboards and governance controls to identify and respond to potential overruns before they became embedded.
Results
Lower spend, with performance protected.
Within the first 12 months, Liaison achieved a $1.8M annualized reduction in AWS spend while maintaining critical availability and preserving the elasticity peak admissions demand requires.
Financial impact
- AWS spend reduced by $1.8M annualized during the first 12 months
- A 40% reduction in cloud costs
- Capacity to reinvest savings in critical business initiatives
Operational impact
- 100% uptime maintained during critical admissions periods
- Real-time visibility and control over cloud spend
- Reduced risk of future cost overruns through governance and alerts
Business impact
- Preserved the ability to support traffic spikes of up to 10× during application deadlines
- Protected the reliability and user experience of a mission-critical admissions platform
- Better-informed decisions about cloud usage and investment
"skie.io has been instrumental in helping us optimize our cloud infrastructure. Their expertise allowed us to significantly reduce costs while actually improving our system's performance and reliability. This partnership has enabled us to better serve our mission of making higher education more accessible."
Liaison International · Technology leadershipContinuous improvement
Keeping savings from disappearing as the cloud changes.
The optimization created more than a one-time reduction. Liaison gained the visibility and governance needed to monitor spending patterns, evaluate new usage and make better cloud investment decisions over time.
Cost and architecture together
Future savings do not come at the expense of availability, elasticity or performance.
Governance and alerts
Potential overruns are caught before they become embedded in the environment.
Better investment decisions
Visibility into spend supports decisions about new usage and platform investment.
What comes next
Turning cloud efficiency into business capacity.
Liaison's results show that cloud optimization can create significant financial value while strengthening, not weakening, the environment. The savings and governance foundation give the organization more capacity to invest in the initiatives that support its customers, its platform and its mission.
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