Use Cases & ROI Examples

This document explores real-world use cases for AWS Lens across different organizational roles and scenarios, with concrete examples of value delivered and ROI achieved.

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Table of Contents

1. For Finance & Executive Leadership
2. For FinOps & Cloud Cost Teams
3. For Engineering & DevOps
4. For Enterprise Architects
5. Industry-Specific Use Cases
6. ROI Calculator & Business Case

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For Finance & Executive Leadership

Use Case 1: Monthly Cloud Cost Visibility & Forecasting

Challenge: A global e-commerce company was spending $2.4M/month on AWS but lacked real-time visibility. Finance only learned of overspend after month-end when AWS invoice arrived, making it impossible to take corrective action.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Real-Time Dashboard: Finance team gets instant access to current month spend

   Current Month: $1,539,490 (as of Oct 24)
   Forecast: $1,906,001 (projected month-end)
   Daily Average: $58,046

2. Early Warning System: Forecast shows projected month-end spend 3 weeks before month-end

   • If forecast > budget, trigger immediate optimization efforts
   • If forecast < budget, consider infrastructure investments

3. Daily Monitoring: Finance reviews dashboard every morning (2 minutes)

   • Identify unusual spikes immediately
   • Contact engineering for explanations within hours, not weeks

Results:

• Avoided $180K overrun in Q1 by catching cost spike 2 weeks early
• Improved forecast accuracy from ±25% to ±5%
• Reduced finance team time from 40 hours/month to 5 hours/month

ROI:

• Tool cost: $2,000/month
• Time saved: 35 hours × $75/hour = $2,625/month
• Overrun avoided: $180K one-time + $30K/quarter ongoing
• First quarter ROI: 3,000%

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Use Case 2: Executive Board Reporting

Challenge: SaaS company needed to report cloud costs as % of revenue to board of directors, but data was scattered across AWS Cost Explorer, spreadsheets, and finance systems.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Automated Monthly Report: Scheduled report delivered 1st of each month

   • Total AWS spend
   • Year-over-year growth
   • Cost per customer (AWS spend / customer count)
   • Gross margin impact

2. Trend Visualization: 12-month rolling chart showing AWS spend as % of revenue

   • Target: Keep below 15% of revenue
   • Alert if approaching 16%

3. Cost Breakdown: Show where money is going

   • Production: 70%
   • Staging: 15%
   • Development: 10%
   • Other: 5%

Results:

• Board confidence: Data-driven reporting shows cloud spend under control
• Strategic decisions: Identified that cost/customer was decreasing (good unit economics)
• Competitive advantage: Lower cloud costs = better gross margins vs competitors

ROI:

• Previously: CFO + analyst spent 12 hours/month preparing report
• Now: Automated report + 1 hour review
• Time saved: 11 hours × $150/hour = $1,650/month
• Plus: Better data enables better decisions (hard to quantify but substantial)

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Use Case 3: M&A Due Diligence

Challenge: Private equity firm acquiring a cloud-native company needed to understand true cloud costs and identify optimization opportunities to improve EBITDA post-acquisition.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Rapid Assessment: Connected target company's AWS accounts to AWS Lens (read-only)

2. 30-Day Analysis:

   • Current spend: $450K/month
   • Identified immediate optimizations: $135K/month (30%)
   • Projected optimized spend: $315K/month

3. Due Diligence Report:

   • Current vs optimal spend
   • Benchmark against similar companies (spend per user, per transaction)
   • 100-day optimization plan post-acquisition

Results:

• Valuation adjustment: Reduced purchase price by $2M based on inefficient cloud usage
• Post-acquisition: Achieved $120K/month savings within 90 days
• EBITDA improvement: $1.4M annually (directly impacts company valuation)

ROI:

• Due diligence cost: $5,000
• Savings discovered: $135K/month × 12 = $1.62M/year
• ROI: 32,000%

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For FinOps & Cloud Cost Teams

Use Case 4: Chargeback & Showback Implementation

Challenge: Fortune 500 company with 15 business units and 200+ AWS accounts needed to allocate $8M/year cloud spend back to business units for accountability.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Tag Enforcement:

   • Required tags: BusinessUnit, CostCenter, Environment, Owner
   • AWS Lens identified 45% of resources untagged
   • Auto-remediation: Assigned tags based on account mapping

2. Automated Chargeback Reports:

   Monthly Report by Business Unit:
   - Engineering: $3.2M (40%)
   - Operations: $2.4M (30%)
   - Data Science: $1.6M (20%)
   - QA: $400K (5%)
   - Marketing: $400K (5%)

3. Drill-Down Visibility: Each business unit can see their own costs by:

   • Service (which AWS services they use)
   • Environment (production vs non-production)
   • Team (sub-allocate within business unit)
   • Project (track project-specific spend)

Results:

• Accountability: Business units now manage their own cloud budgets
• Cost awareness: Development teams started asking "how much will this cost?" before deploying
• Waste reduction: Each business unit reduced non-prod costs by 25% once they could see them
• Savings: $600K/year from increased accountability alone

ROI:

• Implementation effort: 2 weeks
• Tool cost: $3,000/month
• Savings: $600K/year (from accountability) + $300K/year (from right-sizing) = $900K/year
• ROI: 2,400%

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Use Case 5: Budget Management & Anomaly Detection

Challenge: Healthcare SaaS company with $500K/month AWS spend experienced frequent unexpected cost spikes that blew budgets, causing internal friction between finance and engineering.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Budget Configuration:

   • Set monthly budget: $500K
   • Alert thresholds: 75% ($375K), 90% ($450K), 100% ($500K)
   • Alert recipients: FinOps manager, VP Engineering, CFO

2. Anomaly Detection:

   • Baseline: Average daily spend $16,500
   • Anomaly threshold: 20% above baseline ($19,800/day)
   • Alert on anomalies with details: which service, which account, which region

3. Real Example:

   Alert: CloudFront costs spiked to $15K on Oct 18 (normally $2K)
   Root cause: Marketing campaign went viral, 10x traffic
   Action: Acceptable cost (drove revenue), but now monitored

Results:

• Early detection: Caught runaway Lambda function within 2 hours (cost $800, would have been $9,600 if run full day)
• Budget compliance: Haven't exceeded monthly budget in 6 months (previously exceeded 4/12 months)
• Peace of mind: Engineering can innovate without fear of surprise costs

ROI:

• Avoided costs: $8,800 (Lambda incident) + $120K/year (other anomalies caught early)
• ROI: 400% in first year

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Use Case 6: Reserved Instance & Savings Plan Optimization

Challenge: Media streaming company spending $1.2M/month on AWS EC2, mostly on-demand pricing. CFO mandated 30% cost reduction.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Analysis:

   • Steady-state compute: $800K/month (good candidates for RIs/SPs)
   • Variable compute: $400K/month (keep on-demand/spot)

2. RI/SP Purchase Recommendations:

   • 1-year Compute Savings Plans: $500K upfront → Save 20% ($80K/year)
   • 3-year EC2 Instance Savings Plans: $2M upfront → Save 50% ($240K/year)
   • Total savings: $320K/year

3. Utilization Monitoring:

   • Track RI/SP usage daily
   • Alert if utilization < 80% (means money being wasted)
   • Modify or sell underutilized reservations on RI Marketplace

Results:

• Year 1: Purchased $2.5M in RIs/SPs, saved $320K (12.8% ROI on RI investment)
• Year 2: With monitoring, maintained 95%+ utilization
• Year 3: By renewal time, usage patterns had changed—AWS Lens identified new optimal mix, saved additional $50K

Cumulative Savings: $370K/year ongoing

ROI:

• Tool cost: $3,000/month = $36K/year
• Savings: $370K/year
• ROI: 930%

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For Engineering & DevOps

Use Case 7: Service Cost Attribution & Right-Sizing

Challenge: Engineering team at fintech startup was deploying new microservices rapidly but had no idea which services were expensive vs cheap. Over-provisioning was rampant.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Service-Level Cost Visibility:

   Monthly Costs by Microservice:
   - Payment Processing API: $45K (heavily used, justified)
   - User Authentication: $32K (opportunity to optimize)
   - Email Service: $18K (runs on m5.xlarge, could use t3.medium)
   - Audit Logging: $12K (low priority, over-provisioned)

2. Right-Sizing Recommendations:

   • Email Service: CPU utilization 15% → Recommendation: Downsize to t3.medium
   • Savings: $12K/month (67% reduction)

3. Developer Feedback Loop:

   • Embedded cost widget in internal developer portal
   • Each team sees their services' costs in daily standup
   • Cost becomes a performance metric alongside latency, uptime

Results:

• Immediate savings: $45K/month from right-sizing over-provisioned services
• Cultural change: Engineers started asking "what instance type do we need?" before deploying
• Long-term: New services are sized correctly from day 1

ROI:

• Savings: $45K/month × 12 = $540K/year
• Tool cost: $2K/month = $24K/year
• ROI: 2,150%

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Use Case 8: Development Environment Cost Management

Challenge: Software company with 50 engineers spending $80K/month on dev/staging environments that ran 24/7 even though only used 40 hours/week.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Environment Visibility:

   Tag-based cost breakdown:
   - Environment=Production: $120K/month (justified)
   - Environment=Staging: $45K/month (used only business hours)
   - Environment=Development: $35K/month (used only business hours)

2. Optimization Strategy:

   • Schedule dev/staging shutdown: Evenings (6pm-9am) + weekends
   • Uptime reduction: 168 hours/week → 50 hours/week (70% reduction)
   • Potential savings: $80K × 70% = $56K/month

3. Implementation:

   • AWS Instance Scheduler: Automated start/stop
   • Keep production 24/7
   • Exception process for engineers working off-hours

Results:

• Actual savings: $52K/month (65% reduction, slightly less than projected due to some exceptions)
• No productivity impact: Engineers don't work evenings/weekends anyway
• Additional benefit: Faster weekly deployments (fresh environment each Monday)

ROI:

• Savings: $52K/month × 12 = $624K/year
• Implementation cost: $10K one-time + $500/month tool
• ROI: 6,100% in first year

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Use Case 9: CI/CD Pipeline Cost Optimization

Challenge: DevOps team running 500+ CI/CD builds/day on AWS was spending $25K/month, but didn't know which pipelines or which projects were expensive.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Tag Strategy:

   • Tag CI/CD resources with: Project, Team, Pipeline Type (build/test/deploy)
   • Example: Project=MobileApp, Team=iOS, Type=IntegrationTest

2. Cost Analysis:

   Monthly CI/CD Costs by Project:
   - Mobile App: $12K (justified, 200 builds/day)
   - Web Platform: $6K (justified)
   - Internal Tools: $4K (only 20 builds/day, very expensive per build)
   - Legacy Project: $3K (project being sunset, waste)

3. Optimizations:

   • Internal Tools: Move from c5.2xlarge to t3.xlarge (50% cost reduction)
   • Legacy Project: Reduce build frequency (only on-demand, not automatic)
   • Use Spot Instances for non-critical builds (70% cost reduction)

Results:

• Immediate savings: $8K/month
• Build performance: Maintained (spot instances sufficient for CI/CD)
• Developer satisfaction: Faster feedback (expensive builds now only for critical paths)

ROI:

• Savings: $8K/month × 12 = $96K/year
• Implementation effort: 1 week (DevOps engineer)
• ROI: 480%

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For Enterprise Architects

Use Case 10: Multi-Region Architecture Cost Modeling

Challenge: Global SaaS company considering expanding from single region (us-east-1) to multi-region for better latency and disaster recovery. Needed to model costs before implementation.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Current State Analysis:

   • Total monthly cost: $400K
   • Single region: us-east-1
   • Data transfer: $15K/month (mostly CloudFront egress)

2. Multi-Region Cost Modeling:

   Projected Additional Costs:
   - eu-west-1 region: +$120K (30% of us-east-1 for EU customers)
   - Cross-region replication: +$8K (RDS multi-region)
   - Data transfer (inter-region): +$12K (application sync)
   - Total new cost: $540K/month (+35%)

3. Decision Framework:

   • Benefit: 80ms → 20ms latency for EU customers (better UX)
   • Cost: +$140K/month = $1.68M/year
   • Revenue impact: Estimated 5% conversion improvement = $3M/year
   • ROI: Positive, proceed with multi-region

Results:

• Informed decision: Proceeded with multi-region, actual costs within 5% of projection
• Revenue impact: 7% conversion improvement (better than projected)
• Follow-up optimization: After 6 months, used AWS Lens to further optimize eu-west-1 costs by $20K/month

Value:

• Avoided expensive mistake (accurate cost modeling)
• Enabled revenue-generating architecture decision
• Ongoing cost optimization ensures ROI

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Use Case 11: Database Technology Selection

Challenge: Enterprise evaluating MongoDB Atlas on AWS vs self-managed MongoDB on EC2 vs Amazon DocumentDB vs Amazon DynamoDB for new application.

Solution with AWS Lens:

1. Current Database Costs (from similar applications):

   RDS MySQL (similar workload):
   - db.r5.2xlarge (3 instances Multi-AZ): $18K/month
   - Storage (2TB): $2K/month
   - Backups: $500/month
   - Total: $20.5K/month

2. Cost Projections (for new workload):

   Option A: MongoDB Atlas (managed):     $28K/month
   Option B: EC2 + self-managed MongoDB:  $15K/month (but +ops burden)
   Option C: Amazon DocumentDB:           $22K/month
   Option D: DynamoDB:                    $12K/month (at projected scale)

3. Total Cost of Ownership:

   Including operational costs (DBA time):
   Option A: $28K infra + $0 ops = $28K
   Option B: $15K infra + $8K ops = $23K
   Option C: $22K infra + $0 ops = $22K
   Option D: $12K infra + $0 ops = $12K (winner)

Results:

• Selected DynamoDB: Lowest TCO, fully managed, scales automatically
• Actual costs: $11K/month (within projection)
• Savings vs MongoDB Atlas: $17K/month = $204K/year

ROI:

• AWS Lens enabled data-driven architecture decision
• Avoided $204K/year in excess database costs
• Value: Immeasurable (wrong decision would impact product for years)

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Industry-Specific Use Cases

Healthcare: HIPAA Compliance & Cost Optimization

Challenge: Healthcare provider needed HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure but couldn't afford enterprise AWS support contract.

Solution:

• AWS Lens provided detailed audit trails for cost allocation (required for compliance)
• Encryption-at-rest verification for all S3/EBS resources
• Identified $45K/month in non-compliant dev/test data that could be deleted

Results: HIPAA compliance + $540K/year savings

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E-commerce: Seasonal Scaling Cost Management

Challenge: Online retailer with 10x traffic spike during holiday season (Black Friday, Christmas) needed to scale infrastructure but control costs.

Solution:

• AWS Lens tracked hourly costs during scale-up
• Identified that scale-down after holidays was incomplete (30% of resources still running)
• Created alert for "unusual spend in January" (post-holiday)

Results: Avoided $180K in wasted spend from incomplete scale-down

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Financial Services: Regulatory Reporting

Challenge: Bank needed to report cloud costs broken down by regulatory entity (different business lines have different regulators).

Solution:

• Tagged resources by RegulatoryEntity (OCC, SEC, FDIC, etc.)
• AWS Lens generated automated monthly reports for each regulator
• Compliance team saved 40 hours/month on manual reporting

Results: Compliance + time savings worth $80K/year

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Media & Entertainment: Content Delivery Cost Optimization

Challenge: Streaming media company spending $800K/month on CloudFront + S3 for video delivery.

Solution:

• AWS Lens identified that 40% of content was accessed less than 1 time/month
• Moved cold content to S3 Glacier ($120K/month savings)
• Optimized CloudFront settings based on actual usage patterns ($80K/month savings)

Results: $200K/month savings = $2.4M/year (25% cost reduction)

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ROI Calculator & Business Case

Simple ROI Framework

Total Annual Benefit = Cost Savings + Time Savings + Avoided Costs

Cost Savings:
- Recommendation implementation: $X/month × 12
- Right-sizing: $Y/month × 12
- Reservation optimization: $Z/month × 12

Time Savings:
- Finance team: Hours saved × Hourly rate × 12 months
- FinOps team: Hours saved × Hourly rate × 12 months
- Engineering team: Hours saved × Hourly rate × 12 months

Avoided Costs:
- Budget overruns prevented: $XX
- Anomaly detection (runaway resources): $YY
- Compliance violations avoided: $ZZ

Total Annual Cost:
- AWS Lens subscription: $AA
- Implementation effort: $BB (one-time)
- Ongoing management: $CC

ROI = (Total Annual Benefit - Total Annual Cost) / Total Annual Cost × 100%

Example Calculation

Company: Mid-size SaaS, $600K/month AWS spend

Total Annual Benefit:
- Cost savings (15% reduction): $600K × 0.15 × 12 = $1,080K
- Time savings (finance + FinOps): $50K
- Avoided costs (budget overruns): $100K
Total: $1,230K

Total Annual Cost:
- AWS Lens: $36K
- Implementation: $10K (one-time)
- Management: $12K (1 hour/week × $50/hour)
Total: $58K

ROI = ($1,230K - $58K) / $58K × 100% = 2,020%

Payback Period: 0.6 months (less than 3 weeks!)

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Industry Benchmarks

Typical Cost Reduction by AWS spend level:

Annual AWS Spend	Typical Reduction	Annual Savings
$1M - $5M	15-25%	$150K - $1.25M
$5M - $20M	12-20%	$600K - $4M
$20M - $100M	10-15%	$2M - $15M
$100M+	8-12%	$8M+

Time Savings:

• Finance teams: 20-40 hours/month → 2-5 hours/month
• FinOps teams: 80-120 hours/month → 20-30 hours/month
• Engineering teams: Ad-hoc time → systematic process

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Building Your Business Case

Executive Summary Template

AWS Lens Business Case for [Company Name]

Current State:
- Annual AWS spend: $X million
- Cost visibility: Limited (manual monthly review)
- Optimization: Ad-hoc (no systematic process)
- Forecast accuracy: ±25%

Proposed Solution: AWS Lens Implementation

Expected Benefits (Year 1):
- Cost reduction: $XX (15% of current spend)
- Time savings: $YY (finance + FinOps teams)
- Avoided overruns: $ZZ
Total benefit: $[X+Y+Z]

Investment Required:
- AWS Lens subscription: $36K
- Implementation: $10K (one-time)
Total cost: $46K

Year 1 ROI: [Calculate]%
Payback period: [Calculate] months

Recommendation: Approve AWS Lens implementation

Stakeholder-Specific Benefits

For CFO:

• Real-time visibility into cloud spending (no more surprises)
• Accurate forecasting for budgeting
• Quantified optimization opportunities
• Board-ready reporting

For CTO:

• Engineering teams empowered with cost data
• Data-driven architecture decisions
• Optimization without sacrificing performance
• Competitive advantage (lower unit costs)

For VP of Engineering:

• Service-level cost visibility
• Right-sizing recommendations
• Development environment cost control
• CI/CD cost optimization

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Getting Started

Quick Win Approach (30 Days)

Week 1: Setup

• Connect AWS accounts to AWS Lens
• Configure basic tags
• Establish baseline current spend

Week 2: Low-Hanging Fruit

• Implement storage optimization ($20K-50K/month typical savings)
• Delete old snapshots and unused resources ($5K-15K/month)
• Schedule dev/test environment shutdowns ($10K-30K/month)

Week 3: Right-Sizing

• Implement top 5 right-sizing recommendations
• Typical savings: $15K-40K/month

Week 4: Reporting & Governance

• Set up automated reports for stakeholders
• Configure budget alerts
• Establish ongoing optimization process

30-Day Savings Target: $50K-135K/month → $600K-1.62M/year

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Long-Term Strategy (90 Days)

Days 1-30: Quick wins (above)

Days 31-60: Optimization

• Reservation/Savings Plan analysis and purchases
• Multi-account cost allocation (chargeback)
• Custom dashboard for each stakeholder group

Days 61-90: Governance & Culture

• Tagging policy enforcement
• Cost awareness in engineering (embed in developer portal)
• Monthly cost optimization reviews

90-Day Target: 15-20% cost reduction, systematic cost management culture

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Next Steps

Resources

• Executive Overview - High-level AWS Lens introduction
• Key Features - Detailed feature walkthrough
• Solution Architecture - Technical architecture
• Deployment Guide - Implementation instructions

Contact

• Schedule Demo: See AWS Lens in action with your actual AWS data
• Free Trial: 30-day trial with no commitment
• Proof of Concept: 90-day evaluation with guaranteed savings target

Email: support@cloudkeeper.com Website: https://www.cloudkeeper.com/aws-lens

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These use cases are based on real customer experiences. Individual results will vary based on AWS usage patterns, organization maturity, and implementation approach.