Benevity Slashes Cloud Costs by
$1.27M USD Annually with Stratusphere

This case study highlights how Benevity leveraged StratusGrid’s Stratusphere + Success-Based Cost Optimization offering, to reduce their cloud costs, with zero upfront risk and no additional commitments.

About Benevity

Benevity is a leading global provider of social impact software, providing the only integrated suite of community investment and employee, customer and nonprofit engagement solutions. Recognized as one of Fortune’s Impact 20, Benevity provides a robust, all-in-one SaaS platform designed to simplify and scale CSR and social impact programs. The platform unifies giving, volunteering, grants management, and employee mobilization - empowering companies to connect purpose with measurable business results.

The challenge

Benevity hosts their cloud environment predominantly in Amazon Web Services (AWS). While Benevity has strong Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices and engineering standards, they had opportunities for optimization of their architecture in addition to resources that were no longer used or over-provisioned. They wanted a solution that could provide deep analysis and optimization while minimizing the impact to other initiatives.

The solution

Benevity chose to engage with StratusGrid to deploy Stratusphere, along with their Cloud Engineering team, to perform a deeper analysis and remediation of cloud resource utilization. Stratusphere is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that simplifies identifying, managing, and executing cost savings opportunities across complex multi-cloud environments.

StratusGrid's Success-Based Cost Optimization program enabled Benevity to have a risk-free cost optimization completed while minimizing the impact to their teams.

The Engagement:

Onboarding:

StratusGrid and Benevity deployed Stratusphere and onboarded the team, including aligning on source code peer review and change management procedures.

Assessment:

StratusGrid assessed the entire Benevity cloud environment using Stratusphere and additional, internally developed tools — Identifying cost optimization opportunities across the entire cloud architecture.

Approval and Implementation:

StratusGrid reviewed opportunities with the Benevity team to gain approval for execution of optimizations, then implemented those in Benevity’s existing Infrastructure Code (IaC) repositories.

The Results:

Savings were achieved by over 2,500 optimizations being deployed across the environment —allowing Benevity to achieve $1.27M in annual savings, a 25.6% reduction, while maintaining focus on core objectives. These savings enabled Benevity to reinvest in a multi-region architecture for international growth

With the successful completion of this cost optimization project, Benevity can continue to scale its platform and empower more companies and their employees to deliver sustainable outcomes, further amplifying their purpose-driven impact on business and society.

Differentiated Value:

StratusGrid’s unique combination of the Stratusphere SaaS platform, Engineering expertise, and a success-based pricing model provides a differentiated offering vs. other solutions on the market — leading to improved results. A few of the key differentiators are:

Risk-free value:

StratusGrid goes beyond dashboard visibility or recommendations and drives results by directly implementing optimizations with minimal impact on roadmaps and other initiatives. This means you can start capturing savings immediately, and through the Success-Based Cost Optimization model your only execution fees are calculated from the real savings generated by the optimizations delivered!

Real savings

Other end to end optimization solutions rely heavily on rate optimization. StratusGrid’s approach focuses on technical optimizations which result in improved performance and efficiency to reduce overall usage and costs — without incurring additional commitments.

Deep architectural Insights:

Even high performing engineering teams like Benevity have blind spots due to environment complexity, capacity, and team scope. StratusGrid’s unique offering goes deeper than other solutions to identify, plan, and execute optimizations to realize savings from unknown inefficiencies. 

For example, an optimization delivered for Benevity involved code changes to an AWS Lambda function with an inefficient access pattern which was incurring significant GuardDuty costs in another team’s account due to the high volume of CloudTrail events being generated. The resource being modified had a direct cost of less than $100/mo but was indirectly causing approximately $1,500/mo in the other team’s account, with the costs not directly visible or attributable to the true source. This is just one optimization, but there are many such optimizations in the complex cloud environments which enterprises operate today, adding up to big savings!