Overview
About
SonicWall, Inc. is an American cybersecurity company that sells a range of internet appliances primarily directed at content control and network security.
Industry: SaaS (Cybersecurity)
Challenge
Lacking cloud cost visibility, SonicWall had little control over their cloud spending. They needed a partner that could give them complete visibility, engage engineers in proactive cost management, and strengthen their unit economics.
Solution
Implemented CloudZero to boost spend allocation, reduce overspending, and give engineers relevant, timely data about the cost of their cloud infrastructure.
Outcomes
- Increased engineering engagement by 6x
- Steadied cost growth
- Drove unit economic efficiency
The Challenge
In an age of unprecedented cyber risk, cybersecurity companies like SonicWall are busier than ever. From preventing known threats to uncovering novel ones, SonicWall helps insulate businesses — and their revenue — from bad actors online.
Like any cybersecurity company, SonicWall processes an enormous amount of data to keep their customers safe from cyber threats. Consequently, they have a substantial cloud footprint — one that, come 2023, their finance team began referring to as a “black box with a significant cost.”
“Our tagging needed improvement,” said Anh Napier, cloud financial manager at SonicWall. “It made it impossible to answer ‘why’ questions — why costs were going up or down, and what, in either case, we should do about it.”
Behind the “black box,” SonicWall’s cloud costs were rising. Without the ability to trace increased costs to their correct sources, SonicWall’s engineers had little ability to identify and execute impactful optimizations. This “black box,” and attendant cost increases, led SonicWall’s Chief Product Officer to declare cost visibility their #1 objective of 2024.
The good news: SonicWall had a vision. It started with visibility — turning the black box into a clear blue sky, in which every engineer could see the precise costs associated with their cloud infrastructure. It extended to curbing their cloud cost growth, and it culminated in the Holy Grail of cloud cost management: unit economics. All they needed was a partner.
SonicWall’s incumbent cloud cost management provided little in the way of cost visibility or optimization. With cloud spend spanning AWS, Azure, and Atlas, SonicWall needed a solution that could provide unified multi-cloud visibility, with the power to attribute 100% of costs to the products, environments, and owners responsible for them.
The Solution
SonicWall’s EVP of Cloud Engineering, SRE, and FinOps Denis Branco drove an engagement with CloudZero, the global leader in proactive cloud efficiency. As the foundation of CloudZero’s differentiation is elite cost allocation, SonicWall believed that CloudZero would be a strong partner in helping them address their #1 objective for 2024, visibility. Indeed, within a week of starting the proof of value (POV) process, SonicWall and CloudZero had eradicated the vast majority of SonicWall’s cost visibility issues, setting up Dimensions for Environment, Product, and Owner.
“Throughout the process, CloudZero has been very responsive,” Anh said. “It never felt like they were just selling me. They clearly wanted to partner with SonicWall to help us get as much value out of the platform as possible.”
As SonicWall had hoped, visibility led naturally to savings. During the POV process, CloudZero automatically identified a cost anomaly — the cost of a cloud resource rising at a faster rate than seemed normal — and notified the engineering team responsible for the affected infrastructure. The team addressed the anomaly, preventing a significant amount of unnecessary cloud spending.
“That made the team really happy,” Anh said. “Not just because of the raw savings, but because the engineering team could see, in a stark dollar value, the impact of their work.”
SonicWall also configured CloudZero to ingest telemetry streams that would capture the demand data necessary for SonicWall’s unit economics goals. Specifically, CloudZero began tracking the number of firewalls SonicWall processed every day, with the end goal of calculating an ongoing “cost per 1,000 firewalls” unit cost metric.
The Results
Increased engineering engagement by 6x
Even before engaging CloudZero, SonicWall knew that true cost management started with engineers. After engaging CloudZero, Anh, Denis Branco, and others have facilitated the platform’s implementation among their teams. Since switching platforms, SonicWall has seen a 6x increase in their engineering engagement.
Steadied cloud cost growth and drove unit economic efficiency
Even as their engineering production has increased, SonicWall’s cloud costs have decreased.
SonicWall has achieved this through a combination of preventing cost anomalies, addressing cost insights, and decentralizing cost accountability. They have also reduced their cost per 1,000 firewalls.
“CloudZero has driven overall business efficiency,” Anh said. “Our finance team is very happy. We’re serving more customers, and our cost to serve those customers is steadily decreasing. Of all the products I’ve used — and I’ve used a lot — CloudZero is probably the best. They’re very responsive and supportive.”
