Overview
About
Symphony Talent is a recruitment marketing technology company that helps talent acquisition teams automate tasks and empower innovative candidate interactions. Symphony Talent’s award-winning EVP strategy, employer brand campaigns, career site design and recruitment technology support clients across the globe, including the world’s leading brands.
Challenge
A lack of cost visibility was causing uncontrolled cloud spend. Symphony Talent wanted to empower their engineers with the data they needed to manage their cloud costs autonomously.
Solution
Implemented CloudZero to boost spend allocation, identify savings opportunities, and give engineers relevant, timely data about the cost of their cloud infrastructure.
Outcomes
- Reduced AWS costs by 50% against projections
- Gained a true FinOps partner
- Automated core financial reporting
- Improved pricing and renewal strategy
The Challenge
A recruitment technology company with solutions across the entire talent acquisition and retention spectrum, Symphony Talent’s was struggling to manage their complex cloud footprint. With a variety of products, teams, customer types, and cloud providers, accurate and timely cost visibility was hard to come by.
“Particularly when you grow through M&A, visibility is tough,” said Tyler Holbrook, CIO at Symphony Talent. “It’s very easy to create things in the cloud, but it’s very difficult to manage the costs associated with them, especially at scale.”
Symphony had a legacy cost management tool in place, and yet, their costs were mounting; from July 2021 to July 2022, their AWS costs rose by 43%. When they attempted to investigate why, their incumbent tool struggled to give them clear answers.
“I was getting a lot of questions from our finance team,” Tyler said. “‘How are we trending overall?’ ‘How are we tracking against specific budgets?’ I’d have to spend a lot of time digging through the platform, attempting to come up with answers to what were really pretty basic questions.”
Moreover, their incumbent solution’s visibility limitations prevented Symphony’s engineers from taking cost management into their own hands. They’d inherited a multi-cloud environment from an acquisition, and allocation struggles meant limited buy-in across technical teams.
Symphony’s overarching goal was to assess and maximize the return on their cloud investment. Not to cut costs just for cost-cutting’s sake — but to get as much bang for every cloud-native buck as possible. To do that, they needed:
- Multi-cloud visibility. Symphony needed complete cost visibility across their combined AWS and Azure cloud environment.
- Engineering engagement. Symphony needed to send the cost impacts of engineering events — new features, architecture changes, etc. — to the correct teams, quickly, so they could assess cost efficiency, and make changes if necessary.
- Product- and client-level budget accuracy. Symphony services a range of clients in a range of ways — meaning specific clients incur very different cloud costs. So, they needed product- and client-level budgetary accuracy to keep costs under control.
- Automated financial reporting. Symphony’s finance team was relying entirely on Tyler to get insights into their cloud spend. Symphony was hoping their new cost management solution would automate the delivery of important cost data to their finance team.
The Solution
Symphony turned to CloudZero, the global leader in proactive cloud cost efficiency. CloudZero ingested 100% of their cost data, used CostFormation® to intelligently allocate it in a framework that mirrored Symphony’s business structure, and set up alerting systems that would ping relevant teams during unusual spend events.
It was this last piece — CloudZero Anomalies — that provided the most easily quantified value during the proof of value (POV) process. “During the month of the POV, CloudZero found an anomaly that was an incredibly quick detect-and-change,” Tyler said. “It alone paid for the platform for a year. The return on investment was so significant, I could go to my CFO, show him the savings, and say, ‘This is something we need to do.’”
For Symphony, the POV impacts were just the beginning of the story.
The Results
Reduced AWS costs by 50% (against projections) through engineering-led optimizations
One of Tyler’s top priorities was empowering his engineers to manage their own cloud costs. CloudZero made this hope a reality.
In the year before deploying CloudZero (July 2021–July 2022), Symphony’s monthly AWS costs had risen by 43%. Upon deploying CloudZero in July 2022, this growth stopped, and the trend reversed; a year after deploying CloudZero, in July 2023, Symphony’s monthly AWS costs had dropped by 29%. Had their average monthly growth continued, their AWS costs would have been double the CloudZero-controlled July 2023 figure.
The aforementioned anomaly story, Tyler said, is microcosmic of the cultural shift CloudZero has catalyzed. Previously, cost management had fallen exclusively on Symphony’s DevOps and SRE teams; now, all of their technical teams autonomously manage cloud costs.
“This is the first time we’ve gotten buy-in across all technical teams,” he said. “It’s not that engineers don’t want to manage their own costs, it’s that they need data fast and accurate enough to make it possible. That’s what CloudZero gives us.”
Gained a true FinOps partner
Tyler also spoke highly of their FinOps Account Manager (FAM), with whom they meet at least once a month to review their spend environment. “The FAM is fantastic,” he said. “It’s great to have somebody external to the business question things we think we know about. It’s a huge differentiator for CloudZero.”
The FAM is also directly responsible for a significant portion of Symphony’s overall savings. In one instance, Symphony’s FAM Mark Banz told Tyler that migrating their EBS volumes from GP2 to GP3 would lead to substantial savings. After the migration, Symphony’s EBS costs dropped by 15% — a simple switch for substantial savings.
“That’s the kind of thing CloudZero is great at,” Tyler said. “Consistent, easy-to-execute optimizations. It doesn’t take much on our end, and the more we do it, the more we can reinvest in value-add engineering initiatives.”
Automated core financial reporting
CloudZero Analytics automated much of the financial reporting that had previously fallen on Tyler to provide. “Before, finance was asking me how we were trending,” he said. “Now, they have that higher-level data, and they can ask me deeper questions about specific areas that might prompt our engineers to investigate.”
Symphony’s automated financial reports include:
- Reservation Coverage: The percentage of Symphony’s cloud spend that is covered by reservations versus how much is being charged at on-demand rates.
- Tag Coverage: The percentage of Symphony’s cloud resources that are tagged versus untagged, which facilitates product and client level profitability analysis
- EoM Projection: A three-month forecast of Symphony’s cloud costs based on recent trends.
In the future, Symphony plans to track:
- Product- and team-level budgets: Budgets gauged to specific realms of Symphony’s cloud spending.
- Specific initiatives: Symphony plans to hold engineers accountable to bespoke cloud budgets for individual initiatives.
Improved pricing and renewal strategy
As is often the case for SaaS companies servicing Fortune 500 organizations, different Symphony customers incur very different cloud costs. Upon revealing precise cost per client data, CloudZero showed Symphony that they were losing money on a client using a product feature with “extremely high variable costs.”
“We’d been losing money to that client for a long time, we just didn’t know it,” Tyler said. “At renewal, this knowledge empowered us to have a fact-based conversation about adjusting the contract. Either we need to put caps on that feature usage, or we just need them to pay us more. It also informs pricing for new clients we expect to use those features heavily.”
Symphony funnels CloudZero to a wide range of stakeholders: to the board, to illustrate overall trends; to finance teams, to develop and manage budgets; to engineering teams, to get hands-on in managing cloud resources; and to the DevOps team, to help gauge costs and utilization.
“CloudZero gives us the visibility we need to manage our costs in the cloud,” Tyler said. “It’s the first time we’ve had everyone in the organization on the same page about cloud costs.”
