Cost Optimization Services Help a Global Media and Entertainment Company Control Costs on AWS Amid the Pandemic

Business Need

When the pandemic struck, many companies around the world needed to reduce costs as revenues declined. As the number of movies being produced and released began to decrease, and as theatres started closing their doors, many media companies found it difficult to save money as their businesses were shrinking.

To meet their cost optimization requirements on AWS, ErosSTX Global (ErosSTX) was looking to partner with a Managed Services Provider with deep technical know-how of the AWS landscape to assess their applications and infrastructure to implement best practices for cost optimization.

Solution and Approach

Being an AWS partner that manages multiple data centers and provides application development, infrastructure, and cost optimization services to deliver improved business results, Synoptek provided a wide range of managed services to support STX’s AWS Cloud environment as well as their growing customer base. These include IT  Advisory, Management & Leadership, AWS Cloud Infrastructure Management & Support, and Application  Modernization services.

In the beginning of the engagement, Synoptek analyzed the media company’s AWS environment, including an assessment of security, reliability, usage and costs to help understand the pros and cons of decisions made while building their systems on AWS. The assessment helped Synoptek understand their current areas of strength and other areas that required improvement. Synoptek then prioritized those changes for the best impact to their business and to their IT infrastructure on AWS.

Synoptek also performed Well-Architected reviews to assess their workloads and applications for security, performance, resiliency, efficiency, as well as cost optimizations. Synoptek was able to evaluate their applications to identify high-risk issues and provide recommendations for improvement.

After the evaluation of the ErosSTX AWS environment, Synoptek optimized both security and costs first. Synoptek added additional layers of security, enhanced logging, and machine learning, anomaly detection, and integrated threat intelligence to identify and prioritize possible threats. Synoptek also consolidated, decommissioned, and optimized resources to reduce the STX footprint and to realize potential cost savings.

Synoptek also worked with ErosSTX to support their application vendors who build websites on top of their AWS infrastructure. Synoptek uses Infrastructure as Code to deploy the AWS infrastructure that uses elastic computing which will scale up or down with demand. Being able to dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand is beneficial for both reliability and cost. It provides the ability to avoid or eliminate unneeded spend or suboptimal resources.

With Synoptek’s partnership with AWS, Synoptek was able to evaluate their pricing models and recommend commitment discounts.

With all the cost improvements that were implemented, Synoptek was able to optimize the ErosSTX AWS spend to decrease their costs by over 70% per month.

Business Results

Synoptek’s range of Managed Services allowed the media company to:

• Increase security and be better prepared to identify, contain, and investigate data breaches or mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
• Enable elastic compute that scaled down as traffic decreased to realize cost savings
• Decommission websites and infrastructure that were redundant or no longer needed
• Implement cost and usage governance
• Perform pricing model analysis to evaluate costs
• Implement Cloud Financial Management to enable ErosSTX to realize business value and financial success as they optimized their cost and usage and scale on AWS
• Lower their AWS spend by over 70% when theatres were closed during the pandemic and less movies were being produced, marketed, and released