About

‍

ARCA is a leading FinTech company specialising in enabling financial institutions and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to seamlessly accept and process payments in Africa's thriving payments ecosystem. Their innovative products and solutions bridge the gap in the fragmented payments landscape, connecting individuals, banks, businesses, and financial institutions to Africa's digital economy.

‍

‍

The Challenge

‍

ARCA had a diverse client portfolio that included financial institutions of varying sizes and SMEs with unique operational requirements. They faced a common challenge: optimising their clients' cloud infrastructure and IT resources. The key to success lay in identifying the right balance between resource allocation and actual workload demands. They recognized the potential advantages of the cloud but faced several challenges in their cloud infrastructure:

‍

• Cost Escalation: As ARCA expanded its services and user base, their AWS cloud costs were growing significantly, impacting their profitability.

‍

• Resource Management: The dynamic nature of their payment processing applications made it challenging to manage resources efficiently, leading to over-provisioning and underutilization.

‍

• Performance vs. Cost Balancing: ARCA needed to maintain high application performance while optimising cloud costs to stay competitive in Africa's FinTech industry.

‍

• Lack of Cost Visibility: ARCA lacked comprehensive cost visibility, making it difficult to identify specific areas for optimization.

‍

• Scaling Challenges: With Africa's diverse payments ecosystem, ARCA needed to scale their infrastructure efficiently to meet varying demands.

‍

• Data Security and Compliance: As a financial services provider, ARCA faced stringent regulatory requirements. Ensuring data security and compliance while optimising costs was a complex task. 

‍

With 20 applications running on the cloud, they were incurring substantial monthly expenses. To address these challenges, ARCA initiated a cloud optimization engagement with the objective of reducing costs and enhancing operational efficiency. 

‍

Our engagement with ARCA began with an in-depth discovery phase. During this stage, our team collaborated closely with ARCA's IT and operations teams to gain a comprehensive understanding of their existing cloud infrastructure. We assessed the current state of their AWS environment, including resource utilisation, instance types, storage configurations, and data transfer costs. Simultaneously, we conducted a detailed analysis of all 20 applications running on the cloud to identify potential areas for optimization. These included underutilised resources, auto-scaling inefficient code, storage optimization and opportunities for right-sizing. 

‍

One of the key highlights of our engagement with ARCA was our cost analysis, which aimed to understand where ARCA's cloud spending was concentrated and identify areas with excessive expenditure. Armed with this data, we transitioned into the data collection and analysis phase, where we continuously monitored resource usage, performance metrics, and cost breakdowns over an extended period.

‍

‍

The Solution

‍

We took a two-pronged approach to the cost optimization project:

‍

• Get the right people in the same room together.

‍

• Get them the data they need to make intelligent optimization decisions.

‍

To Qucoon, “the right people '' meant both technical and financial representatives. Our approach was not limited to the engineering aspect; instead, we aimed to view the issue holistically, considering both engineering and business perspectives. It was clear to us that any alterations we introduced required a strong foundation in business context. These changes had to be thoughtfully aligned with and evaluated against our overarching business objectives

‍

After extensive work during the discovery and data analysis stages, we reached the culmination of our efforts: the development of a bespoke cloud optimization strategy meticulously crafted to align with ARCA's unique requirements and goals. To achieve this, we harnessed the power of data analytics and cloud optimization tools: 

‍

• Rightsizing Instances: ARCA resized their cloud instances to match actual workload requirements, eliminating over-provisioning.

‍

• Auto-scaling Policies: We implemented auto-scaling for key workloads, ensuring resources were allocated efficiently.

‍

• Storage Tier Optimization: By implementing data lifecycle policies, we moved less frequently accessed data to lower-cost storage tiers.

‍

• Security and Compliance: We deployed enhanced security measures, including multi-factor authentication (MFA) and data encryption, to ensure compliance with financial industry regulations.

‍

‍

The Results

‍

80% Reduction in Cloud Infrastructure Spend

‍

The savings started with low-hanging fruit: Exploring their cloud spend environment, identifying resources that were still on but no longer in use, investigating why ARCA’s infrastructure spend was higher than seemed necessary. Through our collaborative efforts, ARCA achieved a number of remarkable feats:

‍

• 20% reduction in their monthly cloud infrastructure costs, enabling them to reallocate resources strategically. 

‍

• ARCA gained valuable insights into their cloud spending and resource utilisation, allowing for data-driven decision-making in the future. 

‍

• The optimised infrastructure led to improved application performance and responsiveness, enhancing the user experience for ARCA's customers and internal users alike.

‍

• ARCA's cloud resources were now utilised more efficiently, reducing waste and enhancing operational efficiency.

‍

• The optimised infrastructure was better prepared to handle increased workloads and scale as needed to support ARCA's growth.

‍

• With the upgraded security measures, ARCA successfully maintained compliance with strict financial industry regulations, instilling trust in their customers.

‍

ARCA's journey to cloud cost optimization serves as a testament to the transformative power of the cloud. By collaborating with ARCA, we have not only achieved substantial cost savings but have also empowered a visionary fintech company to lead Africa's digital payment revolution with unwavering performance and security. ARCA expressed high satisfaction with the results of the engagement, commending the professionalism, expertise, and dedication of our team throughout the process. The future is bright, and together, we will continue to innovate and shape the landscape of African finance.

‍

‍

‍