How a 200-Person Financial Services Firm Cut Cloud Costs 47% Without Migrating a Single Workload
5/14/20263 min read
Cloud migration is typically framed as the hard part. For most organizations, the more expensive and underexamined problem is what happens after migration: the ongoing management of cloud spend in an environment designed for flexibility, not cost discipline.
The client in this case study is a registered investment advisory firm with 210 employees across four offices. They completed a full cloud migration to AWS in 2022 — moving their core portfolio management platform, client reporting infrastructure, and internal collaboration tools to cloud-native environments. By early 2025, their monthly AWS spend had grown to $87,400 — more than double their original projections — and no one in the organization had a clear picture of why.
The most common statement we hear at the start of a cloud cost engagement: 'We know we're probably overspending. We just don't know by how much or where.' The answer to the second question is almost always: everywhere. Cloud overspend is rarely concentrated in one area. It is distributed across dozens of services and hundreds of individual resources.
The audit: mapping $87,400 in monthly spend
Our cloud cost audit began with read-only billing access and three months of Cost Explorer data. Within the first week, the distribution of spend was clear:
• EC2 compute: $31,200 per month — of which 38 percent was attributable to instances running at under 20 percent average CPU utilization, representing substantially over-provisioned capacity
• RDS database instances: $14,800 per month — including three development database instances running production-tier instance types, and two legacy databases from a data migration project completed 14 months prior that had never been decommissioned
• S3 storage: $9,600 per month — including 47 terabytes of data in Standard storage tier that had not been accessed in over 180 days and was eligible for automatic transition to Glacier pricing at approximately 80 percent lower cost
• Data transfer and egress: $11,300 per month — driven primarily by a misconfigured data pipeline routing analytics traffic between regions unnecessarily, adding approximately $7,200 in avoidable egress charges monthly
• AWS Support at Enterprise tier: $18,200 per month — the firm enrolled in Enterprise Support at migration and had not revisited whether the tier matched their actual support case volume. Analysis showed Business tier would have been fully adequate
• Miscellaneous orphaned resources — unused Elastic Load Balancers, forgotten NAT Gateways, unattached Elastic IPs from deprecated environments: $2,300 per month
The remediation: no migrations, no architecture changes
A critical design constraint: the client's compliance environment — SEC and FINRA oversight — meant that workload migrations and architectural changes required compliance review and could not be executed quickly. All remediation had to be achievable through configuration changes and procurement decisions alone.
Within those constraints, the remediation plan executed over 60 days: EC2 instance right-sizing using AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations saved $9,800 per month; decommissioning two legacy RDS instances saved $4,200 per month; S3 lifecycle policy implementation transitioning cold data to Glacier saved $7,400 per month; data pipeline reconfiguration to eliminate cross-region routing saved $7,200 per month; downgrade from Enterprise to Business support tier saved $14,600 per month; and cleanup of orphaned resources saved $1,900 per month.
The financial outcome
Monthly spend reduction: from $87,400 to $46,300 — a 47 percent reduction. Annual savings: $493,200. Implementation timeline: 60 days. Zero workload migrations. Zero compliance events. Sigma Tech's engagement fee covered entirely by the first month's savings delta.
The firm's CFO noted at project close: "We had a conversation about cloud cost management every quarter for two years. Nothing changed because nobody knew specifically where to look or what to change. This engagement answered both questions in the first week."
What financial services firms need to understand
Registered investment advisors, broker-dealers, and other financial services organizations share a specific cloud cost profile: migration-era provisioning decisions that were conservative for compliance reasons and have never been revisited; data retention requirements creating significant storage costs that are rarely optimized; and support tier selections made at onboarding that have never been benchmarked against actual utilization.
Sigma Technology Consulting conducts cloud cost audits for financial services organizations with full awareness of the regulatory constraints shaping what changes are feasible. Contact us at sigmatechconsult.com to discuss what a cloud audit looks like within your compliance environment.
Sigma Technology Consulting, Inc.
25 Years of Experience, Vetting & Procuring Technology Vendors
Contact Us
Support
© 2026. All rights reserved.
