Discover how we helped Liaison, a leading higher education technology company, reduce AWS costs by $1.4M annually while maintaining performance and scalability. Learn how strategic cloud cost optimization transformed their infrastructure into a growth driver.
See How We Did It
Liaison is a leading higher education technology company that helps institutions achieve their admissions and enrollment goals. With over 30 years of experience, Liaison supports more than 40,000 programs across 1,200 campuses through its Centralized Application Service (CAS™) and other enrollment solutions. Despite their success, Liaison faced rapidly increasing cloud costs due to the expanding complexity and scale of their AWS infrastructure. Liaison approached us to help them further optimize their cloud expenses while maintaining service reliability and performance.
As Liaison's cloud environment grew in complexity and scale, managing resources effectively became increasingly challenging. The team focus was on running the business and ensuring the availability, resilience and security of the environment. Without proper tooling, it became increasingly difficult to aggregate cost views across AWS accounts and uncover savings opportunities. In addition, the challenge was to optimize costs without disrupting operations while supporting an ever-growing list of new products, acquisitions, and business expansion.
Liaison was looking for a partner who could address this challenge collaboratively, focusing on both immediate cost reductions and establishing a sustainable cost management framework.
We conducted an in-depth analysis of Liaison's AWS environment using our proprietary cloud cost optimization platform. Our key strategies included:
We analyzed resource utilization to identify overprovisioned instances and recommended resizing, reducing costs without impacting performance. For example, several m5.xlarge instances were resized to r6g.large, leading to significant cost reductions.
We reviewed usage data to identify workloads suitable for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans, establishing a portfolio of commitments that maximized the discount while managing the risk of under-utilization. Additionally, we standardized on efficient instance families, integrating right-sizing decisions with purchased commitments.
We analyzed licensed RDS databases and provided recommendations to optimize license usage, such as switching to bring-your-own-license (BYOL) models where appropriate.
Rightsizing, right typing, commitments and licensing decisions are inter related and were always considered jointly. This helps ensure maximum utilization of commitments while incorporating licensing and right sizing optimization.
We identified unused or rarely accessed EBS volumes, optimized EBS volume types based on actual usage, analyzed S3 buckets, and applied lifecycle policies and archival solutions to reduce storage costs. For instance, several cold data buckets were moved to Amazon S3 Glacier, resulting in a 20% reduction in storage costs.
We implemented a cost governance framework with real-time dashboards, providing Liaison's teams with visibility into spending patterns and preventing future cost overruns. Key metrics such as daily spend, unused resources, and commitment utilization were tracked to ensure proactive cost management.
Within the first 12 months, Liaison saw an annualized reduction of $1.4MM in AWS spend. Real-time cost monitoring allowed Liaison to keep spending in check and reinvest savings into critical initiatives. Improved visibility and control over cloud resources empowered their teams to make informed decisions about cloud usage.
skie.io is an Advanced Tier AWS, solution partner, and qualified reseller. Established in 2021 by Sal Jamil, Dean Adamopoulos, Rachad Honein, and Rogério Gonçalves, skie.io began as a modest enterprise dedicated to cloud cost optimization. Driven by a desire to make public cloud services more affordable and manageable, we aimed to use our expertise, innovative software, and data science to help customers achieve more with fewer resources.
If your organization is looking to optimize cloud spend and drive efficiency, reach out to us to learn how we can help.
