CloudFix saves Western Digital $450k on AWS in just 6 weeks

About Western Digital

Western Digital isn’t just the world’s leading data storage company — they literally invented the hard drive. Today, more than 40% of the world’s data is stored on its products.

Their mission: to innovate at the boundaries of technology, whether in your pocket, home, car, or the cloud. This innovation is at the core of their culture, whether exploring edge-based solutions in AI and machine learning or creating radical new materials for non-volatile memory.

To invest even more in these innovations, Western Digital relies on AWS technology to accelerate growth while reducing cost. They’ve realized significant savings through their own initiatives — but with a $100 million dollar cost reduction goal, they were highly motivated to explore additional ways to optimize their AWS investment. That’s where CloudFix comes in.

Starting small (and still saving big on AWS) with CloudFix

Western Digital initially deployed CloudFix in just thirty minutes. “We started small to see how the product worked,” explained David Sunarta, Sr. Manager, Cloud Computing. “Very quickly, it became clear that our business stakeholders were comfortable with the security, ease, and reliability of CloudFix.”

They started by just accepting one of CloudFix’s savings recommendations — known as “fixers” — in a single dev account. In their first two weeks, they saved $5k in AWS costs.

Now comfortable with CloudFix’s least-privilege model and AWS-native approach, the team began scaling CloudFix across all their AWS accounts, spanning five different business units. The savings began to snowball, and by week six they had saved an incredible $450,000 — a number they expect will swell to over $1 million within the year.

CloudFix has exceeded my expectations. Not only have we seen significant savings, we have implemented a repeatable, scalable process that is simple to institutionalize and expand.

“CloudFix has exceeded my expectations,” said Jahid Khandakar, CIO. “Not only have we seen significant savings, we have implemented a repeatable, scalable process that is simple to institutionalize and expand.”

CloudFix saves more than just direct costs, too. By enabling Western Digital to optimize AWS spend quickly and easily — spending just a few minutes of engineering time each week — the company has also dramatically increased the efficiency of their AWS cost optimization practice. Since CloudFix only deploys AWS-recommended fixes, automatically and at-scale, Khandakar’s team can reallocate their limited resources to higher-value, strategic initiatives.

Western Digital sees more AWS savings in their future

The plan at Western Digital: keep driving even greater AWS savings using CloudFix. That means adopting CloudFix across more instances and deploying the latest fixes as CloudFix releases them. “Simply put,” said Khandakar, “we are always pursuing better ways to run our business — and CloudFix has helped us do precisely that.”