Case Study
UST PACE FinOps delivers $2M+ in annualized AWS savings for a leading healthcare federation
How embedded FinOps tooling turned cloud cost visibility into continuous optimization and measurable financial control
OUR CLIENT
A leading healthcare federation scaling cloud adoption across enterprise operations.
Our client supports a nationwide network of independent health insurers, managing large-scale digital operations, claims processing, and data-driven services. As cloud adoption expanded, AWS became a core platform supporting the federation's digital operations, and with it, the need for rigorous financial governance at scale.
THE CHALLENGE
The client’s AWS spend was growing faster than teams could consistently optimize it. Cost data existed, but it was not consistently translating into ownership, prioritized action, or measurable outcomes.
Several barriers were limiting progress:
- Cloud spend was outpacing execution: Optimization opportunities were visible, but actions were not consistently carried out across engineering and product teams.
- Cost ownership was unclear: Spend accountability was diffused across teams, making sustained financial discipline difficult.
- Reviews were reactive: Cost management depended on periodic reviews rather than continuous workflows.
- Visibility was not enough: Reporting showed where money was going but did not reliably drive decisions or savings.
This created a gap between knowing where costs existed and having an operating model capable of reducing them. For the client, solving that gap was essential to scaling cloud adoption responsibly.
THE SOLUTIONS
UST deployed UST PACE FinOps directly into the client’s AWS CloudOps workflows. Rather than treating FinOps as a separate reporting function, PACE FinOps served as an insights and execution layer that helped engineering, finance, and CloudOps teams act on cloud spend in real time.
The solution focused on embedding FinOps into daily operations:
- Cost ownership was mapped to teams, products, and environments, giving stakeholders clearer responsibility for the AWS costs they generated.
- Continuous optimization was integrated into CloudOps, replacing periodic cost reviews with day-to-day operating practices across production and pre-production environments.
- AWS consumption data was converted into prioritized actions, helping teams focus their effort on areas with the highest financial impact.
- Cloud and data platform spend was brought under one FinOps operating model, extending governance from AWS infrastructure to Snowflake consumption, showback, and chargeback.
THE TRANSFORMATION
UST PACE FinOps strengthened the client’s FinOps capabilities and created a repeatable operating model that moved the organization from cloud cost awareness to cloud cost control.
With UST PACE FinOps, optimization became continuous, ownership became clearer, and governance extended beyond infrastructure into data platform consumption. This shift was especially important as the client’s environment scaled. Without stronger FinOps practices, cloud growth would have continued to create financial and operational inefficiencies.
Key changes included:
- From periodic reviews to continuous optimization: Cost management became part of daily CloudOps and engineering workflows.
- From shared visibility to defined accountability: Cloud spend became easier to trace to the teams, products, and environments driving it.
- From raw data to prioritized action: Cost signals became a basis for decisions, not just reports.
- From fragmented platform governance to one FinOps operating model: AWS infrastructure and Snowflake consumption were managed through a more consistent governance approach.
This created a stronger foundation for enterprise cloud management, where growth, governance, and financial control could scale together. By embedding UST PACE FinOps into CloudOps, UST helped the client make cost discipline part of everyday cloud operations rather than a separate initiative.
THE IMPACT
UST PACE FinOps helped the client achieve $2M+ in annualized AWS cost savings through targeted optimization. Savings were achieved across the environment by improving utilization across compute, storage, and managed services while reducing waste from over-provisioned and underutilized resources.
The business impact was clear across three areas:
- Lower AWS operating costs: $2M+ in annualized savings gave the client a measurable financial return from cloud optimization.
- Less operational drag: Automation and prioritized insights reduced the manual burden on CloudOps teams.
- More scalable governance: The client gained a repeatable FinOps framework for improving financial transparency across AWS and Snowflake.
Together, these outcomes gave the client a more sustainable way to manage cloud growth. Cost decisions became easier to connect to business value, and financial governance became part of the operating rhythm rather than a periodic review exercise.
Discover how UST helps enterprises turn cloud cost visibility into measurable savings and continuous financial control.
RESOURCES
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