43% lower cloud costs at Evides

Intro

Evides is one of the leading water utility companies in the Netherlands, providing safe and clean drinking water 24/7 to 2.5 million consumers and businesses. To facilitate rapid business growth, the organization migrated to a modern cloud platform on a large scale.

However, with an extensive infrastructure of over 130 cloud servers, a complex challenge emerged: rapid adoption created an environment that became increasingly difficult to manage and control, both technically and economically.

The Problem

Without proactive capacity management, the flexibility of cloud infrastructure quickly leads to over-provisioning — purchasing more IT resources than necessary. This drives up operational costs and reduces efficiency. For the IT leadership and product owners at Evides, it became a challenge to:

• Maintain control over resources: continuously monitor which IT and cloud resources were actually 'fit for purpose' and keep up with updates.
• Balance costs and performance: there was a lack of automated insights that linked technical adjustments directly to the impact on IT costs.
• Ensure sustainability and budgets: as a vital public infrastructure, Evides must demonstrate that it spends public funds efficiently, while meeting strict requirements for reducing its ecological footprint.

The internal IT organization needed in-depth insight and centralized control, without compromising the critical performance and functionality of their systems.

Solution

Evides engaged Aumatics as their dedicated managed IT, consultancy, and cybersecurity partner. Leveraging our deep expertise within the critical infrastructure sector, we established a data-driven capacity foundation. The core of the solution involved the implementation and management of IBM Turbonomic, a specialized tool that translates real-time, automated insights into concrete IT actions:

1. Baseline assessment and tool implementation: Mapping the entire cloud infrastructure (130+ servers). Aumatics implemented IBM Turbonomic to provide immediate, automated, real-time visibility into resource optimization and overprovisioning.
2. Linking technology and costs: Dashboards that create a direct link between technical resources and operational costs. This allows both IT specialists and non-technical product owners to immediately understand the financial implications of their decisions.
3. Data-driven optimization: Proactively executing recommendations from the tool, such as decommissioning redundant databases and switching to more efficient database variants to maximize the price-performance ratio.
4. Safeguarding and sustainable governance: A continuous process in which Aumatics, as a proactive IT partner, monitors and optimizes the cloud environment. The environment scales flexibly with the organization, while costs and the CO₂ footprint structurally decrease.

The role of Aumatics

Previously

• Overprovisioned cloud
• No insight into costs vs. value
• Manual, reactive management

With Aumatics

• Real-time insight via Turbonomic
• Data-driven recommendations
• Proactive, continuous optimization

Aumatics acts as an extension of the internal team and adapts to Evides' complex working methods.

Case study: proactive IT partnership

Due to the complexity of large cloud environments, manually tracking down waste is an impossible task. The solution implemented by Aumatics automatically identified underutilized databases and oversized application services. By immediately implementing these data-driven recommendations, capacity could be precisely aligned with actual consumption. By downsizing or removing underutilized cloud resources, allocated resource usage decreased. This also led to an expected reduction in the cloud emissions attributed to Evides.

Result

Through the new partnership with Aumatics and the use of smart automation, Evides has regained full control over its cloud infrastructure.

• Significant cost reduction: within the first three months after implementation, Evides realized a drop of no less than 43% in cloud costs—even while the total cloud footprint grew by 8% during that same period.
• Informed decision making: product owners and IT managers now make decisions based on factual data. They see exactly how a change will reduce costs and what the impact on performance will be beforehand.
• Sustainable and future-proof: the IT environment is leaner, more efficient, and emits less CO₂. With this, Evides demonstrates that public resources are being used optimally and in a socially responsible manner.

The key takeaway from this case: cloud success is not just about the migration, but about the operational governance that follows. With Aumatics as a proactive IT partner, Evides has found the balance between maximum performance and minimal waste.