Kolleno's journey to enhanced cloud cost management and efficient tagging with Tailwarden

Kolleno is a financial operations platform that centralises and automates receivables, payments, and reconciliation - built for and by finance professionals. Through no-code customisable workflows, white-label payment portals, and centralised data timelines they help their clients collect their outstanding payments with efficiency, whilst not compromising their customer relationships.

However, as their company grew, they began to face challenges managing their expanding AWS infrastructure. Kolleno leveraged AWS services to address their latency and security constraints effectively. By utilizing AWS, Kolleno benefits from a highly reliable and secure cloud infrastructure, essential for their financial operations. Tailwarden stepped in to provide a comprehensive solution for cloud cost management and efficient resource tagging, aligning with Kolleno's growth.

Solution: Tailwarden's proactive tagging monitoring system

Tailwarden's tagging monitoring system was an ideal fit for Kolleno's requirements. This system enabled efficient organization and management of cloud costs without necessitating direct integration into their existing infrastructure. Tailwarden offers a suite of features that allow you to set up your tags on autopilot. In just three simple steps, you can easily identify issues in your tags, implement new tags across all resources, and set up policies to ensure new resources match your tagging system.

Step 1: auditing their existing tags

Using Tailwarden's Tags Audit feature, Kolleno gained an overview of their current tagging state. This helped in identifying inconsistencies, duplicates, or non-compliant tags.

Step 2: implementing virtual tags across the different cloud accounts

With Tailwarden's virtual tags, Kolleno quickly implemented a new set of tags across all their cloud accounts, filling in gaps where existing tags were incomplete or missing.

Step 3: ensuring tags remain clean in the future

Thanks to Tailwarden's policy system, Kolleno defined policies specifying the required tags for different resource types. Once these policies were active, Tailwarden alerted Kolleno in real-time if any resource deviated from these policies, ensuring ongoing compliance.

From tagging to cloud cost visibility

With Tailwarden's solution, Kolleno managed to quickly implement various cost-related tags: costCenter, costOwner, and product. By leveraging the AWS Cost and Usage Report (CUR), Tailwarden delivered granular cost insights.

Tagging is a crucial step to achieving the cloud cost visibility every company deserves. Thanks to our cost reports and newly implemented tags, Kolleno could understand the evolution of costs and identify opportunities for cost optimization:

Additionally, through our inventory and the ability to identify tagless resources, Kolleno pinpointed resources that were no longer needed. While each resource represented a small cost, the cumulative savings were significant.

Results: empowered cloud cost management

Implementing Tailwarden's system resulted in:

1. Greater Cost Transparency: Enhanced tagging oversight provided Kolleno with a clearer understanding of their cloud spending, enabling more accurate cost allocation and optimization.
2. Streamlined Resource Management: Efficient tagging led to more effective resource management and cost savings.
3. Enhanced Decision-Making: Improved insights into cloud costs and resource usage empowered Kolleno’s teams to make informed decisions about scaling, budgeting, and cloud strategy.
4. Optimized Internal Processes: Tailwarden's insights streamlined Kolleno's internal processes, simplifying cloud cost management and reporting.

Conclusion

Tailwarden's proactive tagging monitoring system was instrumental in Kolleno's strategy to optimize cloud cost management amid significant growth. By utilizing tag audits and policies, Kolleno achieved nearly 100% accurate tagging of their resources. This accuracy in tagging empowered them with enhanced cost transparency, enabling the identification of cost-saving opportunities and maintaining control over expenses.