The Right Tools Deliver Visibility and Savings When Migrating to Cloud
A utility company planned a major migration but wanted to avoid the costly mistakes of other companies. Here’s how CDW helped.
Faced with aging on-premises hardware and a growing need for agility, a major U.S. energy provider planned to migrate a significant portion of its data to the public cloud. But after years of watching other organizations see their cloud visions of simplicity and cost reductions turn into sprawling, complicated disarray, leaders chose to tackle cost control, automation and governance from the very beginning of the migration.
“I’ve seen companies get hit with a $600,000 cloud bill over a weekend because they forgot to shut an environment off,” says Patrick McLoughlin, a Red Hat consulting solutions specialist at CDW. “You’re billed by the second.”
“For years, many people viewed the cloud as an easy button,” adds John Skinner, a CDW field solution architect. “The problem is, it can become a very expensive easy button if you don’t put the right controls in place.”
McLoughlin and Skinner were part of the CDW team that helped the utility procure a mix of technologies to guide both the rollout and ongoing management of its cloud environment. These included IBM Cloudability for cost visibility and optimization; Terraform for infrastructure provisioning and standardization; and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for configuration management and operational automation. Together, these tools both sped up migration and gave the company the ability to understand and optimize its cloud spending over time while maintaining consistent, policy-driven deployments.
“They were aware that better practices and better engineering decisions early on were going to help their cloud environment run more effectively, from both a performance perspective and a cost perspective,” says David Wharton, FinOps practice leader at CDW. “If something wasn’t designed perfectly on-premises, that didn’t matter as much, because it mostly just affected the electric bill. But now that everything would be running in the cloud, it became much more important to choose the right infrastructure and modernize workloads.”
“They needed to make every dollar count,” he adds.
Getting Cloud Migration Right
While the public cloud can simplify IT environments, the migration process itself is rarely simple, especially for large enterprise environments with many moving parts. A single workload might span development, testing, staging and production environments, each with its own infrastructure, dependencies and configuration requirements.
Wharton notes that manual processes can be inefficient and prone to error, especially for large migrations on an accelerated timeline.
“Manually setting up a workload may take an entire weekend, including network and server configurations,” Wharton says. “With an Infrastructure as Code deployment, that could be anywhere from 45 seconds to 45 minutes, depending on the size of the workload.”
To streamline its cloud migration, the utility company adopted a combination of Infrastructure as Code and automation tools, using Terraform to standardize infrastructure provisioning with IaC. Meanwhile, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform handled configuration and ongoing management tasks once those systems were in place. The platform also automated routine but essential tasks such as patching, updates and security changes.
The utility is using the platform to automate firewall rule configuration, standardize network and switch configurations and support application-level configuration. “Ansible comes in to provide the day two configuration,” Skinner says. “If it’s a virtual machine, it’s going to lay down the role for that VM. If it’s network infrastructure, it's going to lay out those firewall rules or configure those switches. Without tools like Ansible and Terraform, you’re looking at doing all those changes manually, which gives you greater risk for human error and greater risk for drift, to where you don't have consistent migrations.”
In addition to automating aspects of configuration, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform also unifies resources from different environments, creating a consistent experience for IT teams, says McLoughlin. “Regardless of where you deploy, things look and feel the same, they’re managed the same, and the code is the same,” he says. “Red Hat is completely agnostic. When you are looking to automate a variety of workloads that are built differently, that speak different languages, you need a tool that can accomplish all of that at a central point.”
McLoughlin notes that CDW itself relies extensively on automation tools for its own cloud initiatives. “We want to streamline efficiencies and ultimately remove the human error components,” McLoughlin says. “That’s our methodology, and it’s also what we recommend to our customers who are going through this journey.”
85%
The portion of cloud users and decision-makers who say that managing cloud spending is one of their top cloud challenges
Source: Flexera, 2026 State of the Cloud Report, March 2026
Aligning Cloud Spending With Strategy
In the early days of the public cloud, some thought that the consumption-based payment model would significantly lower their costs. Today, most IT leaders see the cloud as a way to increase agility, not as a cost-saving move. And as cloud environments become more complex, with the rise of multicloud models, these environments often sprawl so quickly that organizations lose visibility into and control over their computing costs.
“Nobody worries about costs until the financial people get involved,” McLoughlin says.
Engineering teams, McLoughlin explains, tend to overprovision cloud environments from the start, prioritizing flawless performance over cost optimization. While this may increase costs only modestly at the beginning, expenses can quickly balloon as cloud environments grow. “Who’s going to sit and go line by line through 300-page bills from AWS, Google and Azure?” McLoughlin asks.
“For years, many people viewed the cloud as an easy button. The problem is, it can become a very expensive easy button if you don’t put the right controls in place.”
— John Skinner, Field Solution Architect, CDW
To get a handle on their cloud spending, McLoughlin says, teams need a dedicated tool and strategy. Most organizations simply pay their inflated cloud bills and move on, and he notes that no hyperscaler is going to call their customers with advice on how to shave their cloud costs.
IBM Cloudability hooks into customers’ cloud environments, aggregating total outlay and providing unified dashboards and reporting, even when using multiple cloud platforms. The tool surfaces optimization recommendations, aligning actions to organizations’ strategic budgets.
“All we have to do is bring their budget in and then take a look at gaps between their budget and their spending,” McLoughlin says.
The Growing Portfolio of FinOps Teams
FinOps teams are playing an increasingly important role in their organizations, according to the FinOps Foundation. In fact, 78% of FinOps teams now report to their organization’s CTO or CEO. Additionally, FinOps teams are managing a significantly larger swath of technology spending than they did even a year ago. Among FinOps teams in 2026:
98%
manage artificial intelligence spending
90%
manage Software as a Service spending
64%
manage licensing spending
57%
manage private cloud spending
48%
manage data center spending
Source: data.finops.org, State of FinOps 2026 Report, February 2026
How To Save on Cloud With the Right Tools
McLoughlin notes that organizations often see savings of 30% to 40% on their cloud bills after rolling out a tool like Cloudability, accompanied by strong FinOps practices. “When you’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the cloud, you want to be able to take a close look at that and see where you’re spending that money,” he says.
As the utility company’s cloud environment matures, McLoughlin says, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will streamline management and maintenance. “When those workloads need version upgrades or patches for security, the platform can automate that process end to end, in a zero-touch fashion,” he says.
Working with CDW, McLoughlin says, gives organizations like the utility company access to industry-leading vendor partnerships. “We have the highest-level partnerships with all of the software providers that we brought to the table,” he says. “Those partnerships give us training resources to upskill the teams that build and design these solutions, and they give us the best pricing.”
By making these investments at the start of its cloud journey, Skinner says, the power company has set itself up for long-term success. “Really, the goal is to eliminate a lot of toil down the road,” he says. “I compare it with building a house: You don't want to get your drywall up and then realize you need your electrical and plumbing. You don’t want to have to tear everything up and start over.”
Calvin Hennick
Freelance Journalist
