Strategic landing zone refactoring (FinOps by design)
TCO assessment of several Cloud trajectories to modernize a lift-and-shift legacy foundation. Architectural rework toward optimized, sovereign native services.
01 Challenges and context
Context and strategic stakes
Following a massive lift-and-shift migration to Google Cloud, the company's Landing Zone had become overly complex, accumulating legacy services, Marketplace solutions, and heavy IaaS components (VMware Engine, Bare Metal Solutions). Once the operational crisis was stabilized, the IT leadership faced a crucial strategic decision regarding an annual Cloud budget of $13 million: optimize the existing setup, refactor the architecture towards Cloud-Native, or purely and simply migrate to Azure or AWS. The objective was to base this choice on irrefutable internal data, not on commercial promises from vendors.
02 Work carried out
Approach and methodology
We supported the IT steering committee by constructing three exhaustive financial scenarios: optimizing the existing environment, Cloud-Native refactoring, and migrating to a competing hyperscaler. For each option, we quantified engineering efforts, operational risks, and the return on investment (ROI) horizon. This modeling incorporated an in-depth sensitivity analysis, considering workload growth, the evolution of vendor pricing grids, and indirect operating costs (licenses, support).
03 Outcomes achieved
Results and indicators
$13 M
Annual Cloud Budget
50 %
Projected GCP Consumption Reduction
80
Stakeholders Onboarded
Projected spectacular 50% reduction in annual GCP consumption through Cloud-Native architecture.
15% decrease in indirect costs (operations, support, third-party licenses).
Cultural transformation: Successful onboarding of over 80 key stakeholders around the 'FinOps by Design' paradigm.