Well-Architected Review of AWS Environment for a Leading American Electric Company

Client

The client is a Fortune 1000 public utility based in Portland, Oregon, and distributes electricity to customers in parts of Multnomah, Clackamas, Marion, Yamhill, Washington, and Polk counties - 44% of the inhabitants of Oregon. C

Challenges

• Client needed architectural and cloud governance guidance and help in achieving and leveraging true cloud benefits.
• They wanted help running and maintaining the existing workloads in AWS while ensuring the highest level of cloud security and performance and regular cost optimization exercises.
• The client used a multi-account structure to host its data engineering workloads in AWS and was looking for a trusted AWS partner to help them through their cloud journey.
• Client wanted to perform a well-architected review of the complete AWS environment and suggest recommendations for cost optimization along with security, performance, reliability, and operations improvements

LTM Solution

• LTM partnered with the customer and took control of their AWS environment with very minimum documentation and knowledge transfer.
• Performed a well-architected review of the customer’s AWS environment with our proprietary tools Infinity and Ensure.
• Review generated 1,08,000 findings including the best-practices recommendations and actual issues identified.
• Implemented preventive and detective guardrails to automate the prevention and identification of security violations.
• Recommended findings for overall security, performance, reliability, and operations improvements along with cost optimization opportunities including but not limited to unused and idle resources, the auto shutdown of non-production instances, storage lifecycle rules, right-sizing EC2, RDS, and SageMaker instances, OS and DB re-platforming opportunities, DynamoDB table capacity sizing, etc.

Business Benefits

• Identified the IAM access keys not rotated in the last 30, 45, and 90 days.
• Improved security posture of customer’s cloud environment by leveraging the security best practices.
• Saved thousands of dollars, bringing the monthly cloud invoice down by 20-25%. Identified opportunities for cost optimization and environmental clean-up.
• Improved overall performance and operation of cloud resources