Customer Overview
CHU Insurance is one of Australia’s largest and most awarded strata insurance underwriting agencies delivering insurance solutions for residential, commercial, and mixed-use strata properties. With decades of experience and a strong national presence, CHU supports thousands of owners, corporations and strata communities.
A digital-first insurer, CHU continually evolves its technology and operations to enhance customer service and ensure regulatory compliance. Their cloud platform, led by Patrick Mamo and Paul Sassella, reflects their commitment to innovation, technical maturity, and scalable architecture.
The Challenge
Despite having a highly skilled cloud team, CHU recognised that managing cloud spend effectively requires specialised knowledge beyond architecture and operations. Key challenges included:
- The need for dedicated FinOps subject matter expertise;
- Limited visibility into granular cloud spend;
- The need for proactive cloud consumption and cost monitoring as well as anomaly detection;
- The desire to strengthen cloud governance and ability to demonstrate and communicate measurable business value.
To address these challenges, CHU sought a trusted partner who could lead cost optimisation efforts, introduce industry best practices, and uplift overall FinOps maturity.
The Solution
CHU was already familiar with Cloudec through previous engagements and valued the FinOps expertise, deep cloud knowledge and the flexible, partnership-focussed engagement model aimed at driving ROI-positive outcomes without additional costs for every unexpected request. When the CHU team reached out with their vision of a significantly better controlled and scalable cloud environment, Cloudec recommended a multi-faceted FinOps solution, consisting of the following steps:
- Implementation of an industry-leading cloud cost management tool, CloudHealth, for real-time visibility;
- A comprehensive optimisation assessment to uncover opportunities to reduce cost and improve performance;
- Promoting close collaboration between Cloudec’s FinOps SMEs and CHU’s technical team to foster shared accountability for cloud cost and continuous optimisation;
- Establishing a regular reporting cadence and knowledge transfer to build alignment, trust and visibility, including a transparent optimisation backlog to drive continuous improvements.
The Outcome
CHU achieved a 15% reduction in cloud costs despite a 10% increase in workloads. With Cloudec’s ongoing support, CHU’s cloud team now detects anomalies in real time, maintains a live optimisation backlog, and confidently communicates the business value of their cloud spend.
Key Results
- 15% cloud cost savings despite a 10% increase in workloads
- Real-time visibility of cloud usage and spend tracked via CloudHealth.
- Measurable ROI with an engagement that paid for itself within months;
- Continuous optimisation including an evolving backlog, anomaly detection, and governance.
