Exnovation as a strategy boost for cost savings!
Exnovation can be an economic mindset. As an IT service provider, we advise our customers on exactly which best-in-class elements they need to achieve their goals – and which of them they don’t need.
The latter is exnovation.
This exnovative attitude is the core component of our consulting approach. Identifying what is not needed in the context of innovation, recommending only those technologies that bring the project forward in a cost-efficient way – that’s the economic heartbeat of exnovation.
What does exnovation look like specifically in the AWS cloud context? Well, just read on.
What does Exnovation mean in the context of AWS Cloud?
The high-quality transformation into the digital world is of immense importance for companies. Mastering this complex challenge has become a basic prerequisite for sustained competitive success.
Decision-makers are therefore increasingly turning to cloud infrastructure to improve their own efficiency. In order to take full advantage of cloud computing, companies must be prepared to optimize their IT infrastructure, replace outdated applications, and adapt their software architecture and organization to the cloud environment.
Exnovation at our customers
We provide our customers with AWS cloud infrastructures into which we embed their IoT products, services or apps – or within which we ensure smooth collaboration across the entire enterprise.
Given that, it’s an inconvenient truth that technologies used by enterprises quickly become legacy. Ongoing innovation is thus a key driver of sustainable business. The pinnacle of innovation, however, is keeping a critical eye on the big picture and taking a holistic and strategic approach to all innovations.
Exnovation: up to 25 % reduction in AWS costs
For example, at one of our customers, the AWS cloud infrastructure was designed specifically for functional servers on EC2 instances. Over time, however, technical legacy accumulated around the operating systems as well as in parts of the software stack, slowing down its business success trajectory. As the ecosystem continued to expand at the same time, new servers were needed in parallel, leading to overhead in the resources used.
Regular review and optimization of existing cloud architectures
On the one hand, our customer wanted to optimize AWS costs. On the other hand, he wanted to adapt his future cloud infrastructure to new business requirements in a more agile way.
We recommended an exnovation strategy that would identify and eliminate inefficiencies within its AWS cloud infrastructure, as well as reduce costs and promote agility. Spoiler: we were able to reduce his monthly cloud costs by a whopping 25% with our actions.
Starting the exnovation process
The first step in the Exnovation process was a comprehensive review of the AWS infrastructure, including a review of all systems, processes and resources. This review revealed outdated or redundant systems and processes, as well as underutilized or unused resources. At the same time, we worked out the migration strategy for development to be able to run applications in containers.
Accompanying workshops for project managers and developers
In order to ideally involve all participants in the exnovation process, we offered workshops for project managers and developers to accompany the realization of our strategy. There, we fine-tuned the impact of the exnovative changes on the development and deployment processes.
Realization of the strategy
While the developers adapted the program code to a microservice architecture, our own team optimized the deployment pipelines by exploiting performance features of the build server. Additional steps were automated in the pipeline, clever caching and parallel compilation were enabled.
Thanks to these measures, we were able to more than halve the time for the build process.
We also re-provisioned the infrastructure. We planned and implemented the infrastructure of multiple EKS clusters, databases, caches and load balancers. The new monitoring runs via Prometheus and Alertmanager. After a short testing and optimization phase, our optimized infrastructure went live with optimal performance and scalability.
25 % cost savings, better agility and responsiveness thanks to Exnovation
Throughout the process between March 2022 and February 2023, our team measured the impact of AWS cost optimization and tracked progress over time. Our exnovation strategy resulted in a 20% reduction in AWS costs. In addition, agility and responsiveness to change improved greatly.
Other benefits of exnovation
In addition to cost savings, our IT team welcomed reduced complexity as another major benefit of the exnovation process: because eliminating unnecessary systems, processes, and resources greatly reduced the attack surface and improved the customer’s overall security posture.
Happy customer
Our customer was happy with the results of our exnovation strategy. It had helped him through a critical phase. He felt he had received the best possible advice, was rid of his legacy issues, and was able to put freed-up resources back into his core tasks.
Our customer’s original plan of using static instances for hosting would have been timely, best-in-class and innovative. But in the end, it paid off for him to trust our standardized, innovation-driven experience and let us completely rethink his original approach. So innovation has taken place here, but thanks to our exnovation-driven consulting in a targeted, sensible and efficient way along his needs.
What makes us particularly happy is that since 2022, we have been allowed to regularly evaluate his AWS infrastructure to continuously find new ways to optimize and reduce costs.
An exnovation strategy makes innovation cost-effective
We firmly believe that exnovation is the best way to help companies achieve sustainable AWS cost optimization. We understand exnovation as a conscious attitude we bring to our customers. Our exnovation process ideally supports the digital transformation into AWS cloud computing.
We identify outdated applications and resources that no longer add value to the customer’s success. Once replaced or optimized, they automatically free up resources for innovation. Decommissioning corporate data centers and migrating legacy applications to the cloud gives companies breathing room again.
Exnovation in AWS Cloud: How we do it
When it comes to “exnovation”, the spectrum of our standards, services and competencies is directly in the realm of management consulting. Because: With an exnovative basic attitude, we no longer stubbornly execute our customer’s wishes exactly as they request them from us based on their subjective viewpoint.
Our exnovative attitude is to understand goals and needs precisely, but to be allowed to critically question solution ideas. If we see a better solution, we talk to our customers about it and try to recommend only those tools and approaches from the spectrum of all best-in-class instruments that lead lean and as quickly as possible to the goal.
Why we like Exnovation
In our eyes, exnovation has much more elegance and beauty than overly complex solutions with which no one is happy in the end. We think it’s good if, thanks to our advice, our client can use his money for innovation in a powerfully targeted way, i.e. not in a watering-can, distorted or wrongly dimensioned way. We also want to be able to make sense of what we do and stand behind what we recommend. Last but not least, we think it’s great that exnovation ultimately even helps to save CO2.