About the Customer
This leading brand in the quick service restaurant (QSR) segment operates over 3,500 franchisee outlets across the U.S. ranking among the leading fast-food restaurant chains.
The Challenge
The company relied heavily on data management and analytics to improve their business decisions in critical areas like inventory management, sales forecasting, and customer engagement.
With their existing Databricks warehouse, the company was incurring high costs for data storage due to an architecture leveraging AWS S3 storage. This led to an escalation in business expenses, driven by lack of cloud cost optimization, inefficient data storage, and excessive data retention. Each year, the company was incurring unwanted expenses to the tune of more than $500,000.
The company needed efficient cloud cost optimization services, which could lower the costs without impacting runtime performance and business agility of the Databricks warehouse.
This solution not only saved us half a million dollars annually but also gave us better control and visibility over our data operations. Managing workspace costs is important for sustaining the efficiency of our scaling team.
-IT Leader
The solution
The Onix team performed a detailed assessment of the company’s Databricks environment to identify the factors that were driving up their cloud costs and operational inefficiencies. Based on this assessment, Onix implemented the following solution:
- One-time cleanup
The Onix team conducted a one-time manual cleanup of unutilized data from the cloud storage in the AWS S3 Buckets. - Automated cleanup
The team then designed an automated cleanup process to regularly remove any unused data from the AWS cloud storage. - Data retention
Next, the Onix team designed and enforced data retention policies to prevent any unnecessary data from being stored on the cloud. - Workforce training
As the final step, the Onix team provided the required workforce training on cost-effective practices in data management and implemented strict cloud governance control to maintain cost efficiency.
Outcomes
- Cost savings in cloud storage: Storage costs reduced by over $500,000 each year.
- Improved efficiency: Reduced manual intervention in data management practices, thus allowing the client’s data engineering team to focus on higher tasks of strategic value.
- Operational agility: Improved operational agility in terms of better performance and data availability without any cost escalation.
- Improved sustainability: Ensured a sustainable cost management model where runaway costs don’t resurface in any business process.
Conclusion
As data volumes keep expanding, organizations (particularly in the QSR domain) need a cost-efficient and sustainable approach to data storage. With Onix’s cloud cost optimization services and expertise in infrastructure modernization, they can seamlessly improve their operational excellence and performance while minimizing their cloud expenses.
