Executive Summary

A fast-growing B2B SaaS provider operating a hybrid multi-cloud environment was facing rising storage costs across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Despite steady product usage, storage expenses continued to climb, separating financial impact from actual business growth.

Through the SKYXOPS Storage Intelligence Engine, the organization uncovered significant inefficiencies across its storage footprint. By eliminating dormant resources and implementing automated lifecycle policies, the Client achieved immediate savings and established long-term FinOps governance to sustain efficiency as the business scales.

Client Profile & Business Context

The Client: A mid-sized SaaS provider delivering real-time analytics solutions to enterprise customers. Their architecture spans Kubernetes clusters (EKS, AKS, GKE), large-scale data lakes, and multi-cloud storage environments.

The Situation: The team excelled at rapid deployment but lacked centralized visibility into their expanding storage estate. Billing reports were fragmented and reactive, making it difficult to track where waste was accumulating. As a result, storage costs grew without contributing additional product value.

The Challenge: The Visibility Gap

Before partnering with SKYXOPS, the Client faced several structural issues that were undermining their cost efficiency:

• Invisible Operational Waste: Unattached resources such as idle block storage volumes were still active and incurring charges despite not supporting any workloads. These dormant assets had gone undetected due to the lack of unified visibility.
• Inefficient Data Tiering: Large amounts of historical data were stored in high-cost tiers even though access patterns suggested they were rarely used. Without detailed insights, engineering teams were reluctant to move data into lower-cost archival tiers.
• Multi-Cloud Fragmentation: With storage distributed across AWS, Azure, and GCP, inefficiencies such as redundant backups and unpartitioned datasets went unnoticed. This fragmentation contributed substantially to unnecessary storage consumption.

The Solution: SKYXOPS Storage Intelligence Engine

To resolve these issues without disrupting production systems, the Client deployed the SKYXOPS Storage Intelligence Engine using a Visibility-First approach.

Key Results

Within the first month, the Client saw meaningful transformation in how they managed and governed storage:

• Storage Waste Identified: Full categorization of waste across the environment.
• Immediate Savings: Realized by removing dormant volumes and unused resources.
• Archival Migration: Large sets of infrequently accessed data prepared for lower-cost tiers.
• Lifecycle Governance: Policies expanded significantly, enabling long-term automation.
• Continuous Clarity: Engineering teams gained visibility into storage utilization across all clouds.

Conclusion

This engagement demonstrates that substantial value can be reclaimed from cloud storage environments without re-architecting applications. By shedding light on otherwise invisible inefficiencies, the Client reshaped their storage footprint into a streamlined, well-governed asset.

With automated lifecycle management and unified visibility now in place, the organization is positioned to scale confidently while ensuring future storage spending remains aligned with true business value.