The Henson Group Reduces Cloud Costs by 28%

• Siloed infrastructure patterns – Different teams used inconsistent templates, resulting in drift across regions and non-standard configurations that complicated support, compliance and quality assurance.
• Manual provisioning and long release cycles – Environment builds and updates required hand-operated scripts and approvals; deployments were slow and error prone.
• Reactive security controls – Security checks were often afterthoughts or manual tasks, increasing detection times and the risk of misconfiguration.
• Limited observability and noisy alerts – Monitoring was fragmented across tools; teams lacked a consolidated view of cost, performance, and incidents.
• Unpredictable cost behaviour – Without enforced tagging and guardrails, spend spikes and orphaned resources were common, making forecasting and show back difficult.
• Difficult cross region scalability – Designs didn’t scale reliably across Azure regions, leading to inconsistent SLAs for customers operating globally.

These issues increased operational overhead, risk exposure, and limited the ability to deliver reliable enterprise software development services at scale.

• Azure landing zone standardization – Implemented enterprise grade landing zones aligned to Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework principles. Each landing zone enforced naming, networking, identity, and resource segregation patterns.
• Infrastructure as Code and templates – Built parameterized Bicep modules and Terraform modules for tenant bootstrap, networking, AKS clusters, and data platforms. Modules included idempotent patterns and ready-made policy assignments.
• Policy driven governance – Deployed Azure Policy and initiatives to enforce tagging, SKU constraints, allowed regions, and security posture. Non-compliant deployments were automatically flagged or blocked.
• Modern DevOps toolchain – Created CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions for application delivery and platform releases, with environment promotion, automated tests, and canary rollouts.
• Secure connectivity & identity – Implemented ExpressRoute/Virtual WAN designs for hybrid connectivity, Azure AD governance with conditional access, and Privileged Identity Management for just in time admin elevation.
• Observability & incident automation – Centralized telemetry in Azure Monitor and Log Analytics, integrating business intelligence dashboards for cost, performance, and SRE runbooks. Integrated Azure Sentinel for security analytics and automated playbooks for common incidents.
• Cost management & optimization – Rolled out tagging, budgets, reserved instance commitments, and autoscaling strategies. Implemented an internal show back dashboard so teams could monitor spend by project and environment.
• Resilience patterns – Standardized backup, recovery, and cross region failover guidance. Implemented traffic manager/Front Door patterns and geo redundant storage for critical workloads.
• Operational handover & enablement – Delivered runbooks, runbook automation, and training sessions. Created a managed service playbook so Henson’s delivery teams could repeat the setup for customers.

• Cloud cost reduction: 28% – Tagging, rightsizing, commitment planning, and automatic scale down saved significant monthly spend and eliminated many idle resources.
• Deployment velocity 4× increase – Release cadence rose as teams moved from manual scripts to full CI/CD; environments that once took days to provision now stand up in under an hour.
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR) reduced by 70% – Centralized observability and automated remediation playbooks shortened incident resolution time substantially.
• Security incident volume down by 62% – Policy enforcement, continuous threat detection, and automated blocking cut the number of security escalations and misconfiguration events.
• Operational efficiency 5,000 hours saved annually (2.4 FTE) – Automation of provisioning, patching, and compliance checks freed engineering and ops staff for higher value activities.
• Cross region reliability improved – Standardized templates and geo aware patterns reduced region specific configuration issues, customer SLA compliance rose across global deployments.
• Faster customer onboarding – Repeatable landing zone provisioning and a prebuilt catalogue accelerated new customer environments by 70%, enabling faster time to revenue for managed services.
• Faster feature rollouts – With automated pipelines and safe deployment gates, Henson launched platform updates more frequently with fewer rollbacks.
• Payback & ROI – Cost savings, productivity gains, and accelerated deal closures produced a typical project payback in 8–11 months, with first year ROI exceeding 150% in most scenarios.