How does a multinational cosmetics company reduce its public cloud spend without compromising end-user experience?
Founded in 1969, Natura &Co is a cosmetics company headquartered in Brazil that serves customers across Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia. The sixth largest direct sales company in the world, Natura is known for its innovative culture and its mission to offer beauty and personal care solutions in a conscious and responsible manner, growing its business while also helping to preserve the environment and promote sustainability.
Natura has a robust infrastructure, logistics and digital technology base that support a range of business-critical applications such as its e-commerce platform, which is utilized by sales reps all over the world. Due to IT investments made in recent years, the company has achieved the best level of service in its history. “Today we are managing thousands of workloads across VMware, AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI and Kubernetes. We are increasing more and more services, so cost reduction is a main motivator when we look for a new tool,” explains Dennys Ber, Manager of Natura’s IT department.
Even though Natura’s legacy system was fully functional, Ber knew that in order to optimize performance and effectively manage cost in the long run, the team would need to take a more proactive approach to allocating resources. It was time to look for a platform that would allow Natura to automate resource management and allow its multicloud environment to become self-healing.
Ber aimed to reduce time devoted to “war rooms” and free up the team to focus on strategic initiatives that would advance business-level goals rather than solve ad hoc IT problems. He was also looking for ways to achieve consistent alignment across a multinational team of engineers and systems administrators. “We needed to find a way to reduce the team’s manual work and implement a solution that could make our environment become self-healing,” Ber notes. This is when the team turned to ScaleUP Consultoria and the IBM® Turbonomic® solution.
Learn how you can use Turbonomic to automate performance and cost optimization actions across your private, public or hybrid cloud.
Natura’s journey with Turbonomic hybrid cloud cost optimization began with establishing a single view of the firm’s entire multicloud estate. With the help of Turbonomic, the team built a macro view of all its environments in a matter of minutes. This view helped them see their entire estate in a single dashboard. The next step was allowing IBM Turbonomic automation to dynamically monitor and manage resource usage.
“Initially, our top priority was to gain efficiency in our public cloud costs. But soon we saw that Turbonomic could do more with resource allocation. It could also help us prevent performance issues, not only in the public cloud but also in the private cloud. This set Turbonomic apart from other tools in the market,” reports Bers.
As Natura’s cloud journey is just getting started, the IT team has also been exploring ways to optimize its on-premises environment. “Before the Turbonomic implementation, we had a scenario with a VMware cluster with Linux machines where we thought we were going to need to purchase new machines. But, with the help of Turbonomic, we saw that by moving workloads between hosts, not only would we avoid the cost of a new machine, but we could also deactivate existing machines and extend their lifespan. This, without a doubt, drew a lot of attention from the team,” recalls Natura’s Senior IT Manager.
“We observed Turbonomic make a swift impact on our business. The tool paid for itself in the first three, four months. Initially, we had looked for a solution precisely because of the savings in the public cloud, but over time we also observed improvements in performance across our public cloud estate and our on-premises environment,” notes Ber. Over a 90-day period, the team observed the tool carry out more than 5,800 automated actions which not only improved application performance but generated significant financial savings. In fact, Natura has saved over USD 260,000 on its public cloud spend in the first twelve months of implementing Turbonomic.
ScaleUP Consultoria has played a key role in this journey, helping Natura make its operations even more efficient while maintaining its position as a leader in the industry and reinforcing its brand positioning in the face of its customers and consumers.
In line with Natura’s sustainability strategy, the IT team has a goal of reducing energy consumption in its main data centers by 5% compared to the previous year. By bringing about a significant decrease in resource utilization, IBM Turbonomic also serves Ber and his team’s sustainability goal. “When I manage my resources better with IBM Turbonomic and I see that I can do more with less, without having to purchase new hardware, I gain energy efficiency that, consequently, supports our carbon reduction goal,” he explains.
Founded in 1969, Natura is the largest Brazilian cosmetics and perfumery multinational. One of the largest beauty sector organizations in Latin America, it was classified as the sixth largest direct sales company in the world, also operating in Europe and Asia through other channels.
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