As demonstrated by forward-thinking organizations and shared through the FinOps Foundation’s community stories, this case reflects practical strategies enterprises are using to reclaim control over cloud and SaaS spend.
When you operate at the scale of a global media powerhouse, serving live sports through ESPN, streaming hits on Disney+, powering studios, cruises, and broadcast television, your infrastructure footprint doesn't just span continents. It spans generations of technology.
From tightly-controlled on-premise data centers to edge caches deployed in ISP facilities, from legacy broadcast systems to modern observability stacks running on SaaS, and cloud-native data pipelines across AWS and GCP, this enterprise wasn’t managing a single environment. It was navigating a hybrid maze.
But while the tech stack had grown in complexity to meet operational demands, financial visibility hadn’t kept up.
Engineering teams could answer questions about latency, throughput, or availability. Finance could describe the monthly bill. But nobody could confidently answer:
This lack of cohesive visibility made FinOps hybrid cloud optimization more aspiration than action. And with cost pressure rising, internal alignment fracturing, and partner pricing doubling without notice, leadership realized the need for a unified decision-making model, one that could finally rationalize workloads across environments.
That model became what they called cartography.
More than a metaphor, cartography was a strategy, a method of mapping not just services and servers, but financial ownership, footprint density, business value, and replatforming friction. Application footprint became the unit of measurement. Total cost of ownership became the currency. The OSI model became the lens through which cloud, SaaS, and on-prem were compared.
The goal wasn’t to eliminate hybrid complexity. It was to understand it, map it, and make decisions with precision.
What emerged was a media cloud strategy defined by architectural clarity, BRM-backed vendor accountability, and product-aware cost modeling that reframed cloud conversations from “where’s the waste?” to “what’s the smartest deployment?”
This is the case study of how a media and entertainment giant transformed cost chaos into cartographic clarity by turning visibility into strategy.
These are the exact types of problems CloudNuro.ai was built to solve, helping IT, finance, and engineering teams align around cost, usage, and optimization across hybrid digital environments.
For this media and entertainment enterprise, infrastructure was never monolithic. It had been hybridized by necessity long before hybrid became fashionable. Live broadcasts needed real-time delivery through edge networks. Studio tools depended on legacy file systems housed in proprietary on-prem systems. OTT streaming workloads exploded into the cloud. Analytics workloads lived on multi-cloud data lakes. SaaS applications were adopted team by team, without a central taxonomy or cost governance layer.
Each environment had its cost model, telemetry tooling, and stakeholder base. Which meant FinOps leaders couldn’t rely on traditional cloud optimization playbooks.
They needed a navigation system, not just cost alerts.
The journey began with an uncomfortable truth. Even as cloud bills crossed tens of millions per year, and on-prem assets were actively depreciating, there was no way to compare them on a like-for-like basis.
Public cloud spend was visible, per region, SKU, or tag. On-prem cost was embedded in CapEx cycles, amortization schedules, and rack utilization reports. SaaS spend was abstracted behind annual agreements and headcount assumptions.
Every environment is lived in a different financial language. And engineering teams, unsurprisingly, defaulted to what was most familiar. Some are built in the cloud by default. Others stayed anchored on-prem out of risk aversion.
This “visibility debt” meant the architecture was not guided by cost, but by inertia.
This level of financial normalization is exactly what CloudNuro surfaces across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem.
To solve this, the team didn't begin with tooling. They began with cartography, a practice of mapping the environment based on:
This mapping exercise was owned not by a single platform team, but by a cross-functional group, FinOps leaders, architects, BRMs (business relationship managers), and engineering SMEs. Together, they created an inventory that included technical metadata, financial ownership, architectural alignment, and even business intent.
For example:
Cartography exposed these cross-cutting concerns and made them visible in one plane.
A brilliant insight emerged during the cartography initiative: different workloads needed to be compared not just by vendor or cost, but by network layer.
The team began aligning services by OSI layer, asking:
This analysis transformed cloud decision-making. It wasn’t just about cost per VM or storage tier. It became about the business context and network placement fit.
Workloads were tagged as:
Each class came with known unit cost patterns, vendor relationship implications, and replatforming difficulty scores.
CloudNuro allows enterprises to map workload profiles and match them to cost and usage data automatically.
A surprising unlock came from involving business relationship managers (BRMs) early. Instead of treating SaaS as a fixed cost or infrastructure as “owned,” BRMs helped FinOps teams understand:
This relationship layer became critical. BRMs validated cost allocations, negotiated down unused spend, and gave architecture teams a roadmap to deprecate legacy systems during contract renewals.
In one example, the BRM team identified an internal service consuming compute both in AWS and in a redundant SaaS platform, with no team accountable for unifying them. Cartography revealed it, BRMs raised it, and a FinOps analyst tracked the opportunity cost.
With cartography in place, the team created replatforming candidates, not by opinion, but by facts.
Each candidate had:
This allowed the company to make moves like:
Every move had a business-aligned justification, tracked in dashboards and shared with finance, tech leadership, and vendor management.
Want to see what this would look like for your hybrid estate? Schedule a walkthrough with CloudNuro and explore hybrid cost maps built from your data.
The hybrid cloud cartography initiative was more than a mapping exercise; it fundamentally changed how this media organization made architectural, financial, and operational decisions. What started as a tactical visibility fix evolved into a strategic FinOps framework that touched every function: architecture, finance, engineering, procurement, and business operations.
The results were measurable in dollars, time, confidence, and accountability.
The cartography model directly surfaced millions in potential savings by exposing misaligned workloads and underutilized environments.
Unlike previous cost initiatives, which relied on cloud-native telemetry alone, these savings were possible only because the team compared cloud, SaaS, and on-prem with unified financial logic.
CloudNuro enables this kind of normalized TCO modeling across hybrid workloads automatically.
With cartographic visibility, architectural planning shifted from weeks of stakeholder alignment to structured decision-making based on workload type, replatforming difficulty, and contract cycles.
This velocity gain didn’t just save time; it increased the quality of decisions and trust between departments.
One of the most transformational outcomes came when teams began benchmarking unit economics across hybrid environments. They moved beyond cost per VM or license and started asking:
These metrics reshaped prioritization. One platform team postponed a lift-and-shift when cartography showed that the cost per transaction would nearly double after cloud migration. Another team confidently moved to public cloud after modeling showed a 46% reduction in cost per data transformation.
CloudNuro enables this same depth of cost-to-value analysis, driven by context, not guesswork.
The hybrid cartography initiative improved governance without increasing friction. Because it unified visibility across business, finance, and engineering, it created a shared language:
As a result:
And leadership had a line of sight into where waste lived, where investment was justified, and which services deserved acceleration.
Before cartography, infrastructure conversations were marked by defensiveness. Engineers justified spending, finance questioned forecasts, and procurement challenged renewals. After cartography, those same discussions shifted tone.
Engineers could say, “We run on-prem because latency saves us 30% in upstream bandwidth.” Finance could say, “This SaaS app is overlicensed. Can we downgrade?” Procurement could say, “The contract renews in six months. Is this workload ready to shift?”
Because everyone was looking at the same map, with financial overlays and service intent, the bias was gone, the evidence was present, and the trust returned.
CloudNuro helps rebuild this alignment with transparent data models and cost allocation clarity across hybrid estates.
The cartography approach wasn’t just a one-off success; it’s a replicable blueprint for any enterprise navigating complex digital estates. Whether you're a media titan or an enterprise juggling on-prem assets and SaaS bloat, the learnings here provide actionable steps to operationalize FinOps across hybrid environments.
Jumping into cloud migrations or SaaS consolidation without visibility is a recipe for waste. This media organization proved that mapping application footprints across cost, architecture, and usage should precede any optimization initiative. Cartography isn’t a technical diagram. It’s a financial instrument. You need to know what you have, where it lives, and what it’s costing you across all environments.
CloudNuro delivers this visibility upfront, helping FinOps and IT leaders map before they move.
Not all workloads are meant for the cloud. Some depend on proximity, network latency, or contractual lock-in. By analyzing where a service falls in the OSI stack, teams can make smarter decisions about environment fit. For example, a workload heavy in Layer 4–7 operations might thrive in cloud-native platforms, while Layer 1–3 dependencies often perform better on-prem or edge.
FinOps isn’t about moving everything to the cloud; it’s about placing the right workload in the right place, for the correct cost.
Many enterprises ignore the on-prem cost in FinOps because it's capitalized or prepaid. Others ignore SaaS because it's "just licensing." But this team showed the power of comparing unit economics across all environments using normalized cost models. That’s how real FinOps maturity is achieved, when SaaS waste and on-prem overhead are managed with the same rigor as cloud spend.
CloudNuro helps teams unify cost data across SaaS, IaaS, and on-prem, turning fragmented views into a single financial truth.
Business Relationship Managers were instrumental in translating technical opportunity into procurement action. They brought contract timelines, renewal clauses, usage trends, and service ownership into the cartography model. Every FinOps program should enlist BRMs to act as connective tissue between architecture, finance, and vendor management.
FinOps tooling often floods teams with alerts, idle VMs, overprovisioned clusters, and spend spikes. But this case study proves that visual, contextual maps are more actionable. When a team sees that a service costs 60% more in the cloud versus on-prem, and that it’s scheduled for contract renewal, they make decisions. They don’t just acknowledge alerts; they act.
Some workloads are expensive but justified. Others are cheap but inefficient. The team’s cost cartography model factored in the cost-to-move, data gravity, dependencies, licensing constraints, as well as the operational cost. This nuance allowed them to sequence migrations logically, not emotionally. It also helped defer migrations that weren’t worth the engineering investment.
CloudNuro supports this by modeling cost impact, migration friction, and ownership readiness across your portfolio.
This case study isn’t about a media company; it’s about what’s possible when FinOps evolves from cost control to cost intelligence. By mapping application footprints, comparing costs across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem, and aligning workloads to OSI layers and business value, this enterprise made hybrid complexity actionable.
They didn’t eliminate on-prem. They didn’t abandon SaaS. They didn’t default to cloud.
They optimized across all three, with data, context, and shared visibility.
CloudNuro.ai enables this same transformation. Whether you're untangling redundant SaaS tools, trying to right-size cloud spend, or wondering if that on-prem system is still worth maintaining, we give you the visibility and control to:
You don’t need to wait for a crisis to start this. You need the correct map.
Want to replicate this transformation?
Book a free FinOps insights demo with CloudNuro.ai and see how hybrid cost cartography can unlock smarter decisions across your tech stack.
This transformation wasn’t driven by tooling alone. It was enabled by visibility, collaboration, and a willingness to rethink how hybrid architecture is planned and governed.
CloudNuro provides the foundation for this level of cross-platform visibility and financial accountability, out of the box.
This story was initially shared with the FinOps Foundation as part of their enterprise case study series.
Request a no cost, no obligation free assessment —just 15 minutes to savings!
Get StartedAs demonstrated by forward-thinking organizations and shared through the FinOps Foundation’s community stories, this case reflects practical strategies enterprises are using to reclaim control over cloud and SaaS spend.
When you operate at the scale of a global media powerhouse, serving live sports through ESPN, streaming hits on Disney+, powering studios, cruises, and broadcast television, your infrastructure footprint doesn't just span continents. It spans generations of technology.
From tightly-controlled on-premise data centers to edge caches deployed in ISP facilities, from legacy broadcast systems to modern observability stacks running on SaaS, and cloud-native data pipelines across AWS and GCP, this enterprise wasn’t managing a single environment. It was navigating a hybrid maze.
But while the tech stack had grown in complexity to meet operational demands, financial visibility hadn’t kept up.
Engineering teams could answer questions about latency, throughput, or availability. Finance could describe the monthly bill. But nobody could confidently answer:
This lack of cohesive visibility made FinOps hybrid cloud optimization more aspiration than action. And with cost pressure rising, internal alignment fracturing, and partner pricing doubling without notice, leadership realized the need for a unified decision-making model, one that could finally rationalize workloads across environments.
That model became what they called cartography.
More than a metaphor, cartography was a strategy, a method of mapping not just services and servers, but financial ownership, footprint density, business value, and replatforming friction. Application footprint became the unit of measurement. Total cost of ownership became the currency. The OSI model became the lens through which cloud, SaaS, and on-prem were compared.
The goal wasn’t to eliminate hybrid complexity. It was to understand it, map it, and make decisions with precision.
What emerged was a media cloud strategy defined by architectural clarity, BRM-backed vendor accountability, and product-aware cost modeling that reframed cloud conversations from “where’s the waste?” to “what’s the smartest deployment?”
This is the case study of how a media and entertainment giant transformed cost chaos into cartographic clarity by turning visibility into strategy.
These are the exact types of problems CloudNuro.ai was built to solve, helping IT, finance, and engineering teams align around cost, usage, and optimization across hybrid digital environments.
For this media and entertainment enterprise, infrastructure was never monolithic. It had been hybridized by necessity long before hybrid became fashionable. Live broadcasts needed real-time delivery through edge networks. Studio tools depended on legacy file systems housed in proprietary on-prem systems. OTT streaming workloads exploded into the cloud. Analytics workloads lived on multi-cloud data lakes. SaaS applications were adopted team by team, without a central taxonomy or cost governance layer.
Each environment had its cost model, telemetry tooling, and stakeholder base. Which meant FinOps leaders couldn’t rely on traditional cloud optimization playbooks.
They needed a navigation system, not just cost alerts.
The journey began with an uncomfortable truth. Even as cloud bills crossed tens of millions per year, and on-prem assets were actively depreciating, there was no way to compare them on a like-for-like basis.
Public cloud spend was visible, per region, SKU, or tag. On-prem cost was embedded in CapEx cycles, amortization schedules, and rack utilization reports. SaaS spend was abstracted behind annual agreements and headcount assumptions.
Every environment is lived in a different financial language. And engineering teams, unsurprisingly, defaulted to what was most familiar. Some are built in the cloud by default. Others stayed anchored on-prem out of risk aversion.
This “visibility debt” meant the architecture was not guided by cost, but by inertia.
This level of financial normalization is exactly what CloudNuro surfaces across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem.
To solve this, the team didn't begin with tooling. They began with cartography, a practice of mapping the environment based on:
This mapping exercise was owned not by a single platform team, but by a cross-functional group, FinOps leaders, architects, BRMs (business relationship managers), and engineering SMEs. Together, they created an inventory that included technical metadata, financial ownership, architectural alignment, and even business intent.
For example:
Cartography exposed these cross-cutting concerns and made them visible in one plane.
A brilliant insight emerged during the cartography initiative: different workloads needed to be compared not just by vendor or cost, but by network layer.
The team began aligning services by OSI layer, asking:
This analysis transformed cloud decision-making. It wasn’t just about cost per VM or storage tier. It became about the business context and network placement fit.
Workloads were tagged as:
Each class came with known unit cost patterns, vendor relationship implications, and replatforming difficulty scores.
CloudNuro allows enterprises to map workload profiles and match them to cost and usage data automatically.
A surprising unlock came from involving business relationship managers (BRMs) early. Instead of treating SaaS as a fixed cost or infrastructure as “owned,” BRMs helped FinOps teams understand:
This relationship layer became critical. BRMs validated cost allocations, negotiated down unused spend, and gave architecture teams a roadmap to deprecate legacy systems during contract renewals.
In one example, the BRM team identified an internal service consuming compute both in AWS and in a redundant SaaS platform, with no team accountable for unifying them. Cartography revealed it, BRMs raised it, and a FinOps analyst tracked the opportunity cost.
With cartography in place, the team created replatforming candidates, not by opinion, but by facts.
Each candidate had:
This allowed the company to make moves like:
Every move had a business-aligned justification, tracked in dashboards and shared with finance, tech leadership, and vendor management.
Want to see what this would look like for your hybrid estate? Schedule a walkthrough with CloudNuro and explore hybrid cost maps built from your data.
The hybrid cloud cartography initiative was more than a mapping exercise; it fundamentally changed how this media organization made architectural, financial, and operational decisions. What started as a tactical visibility fix evolved into a strategic FinOps framework that touched every function: architecture, finance, engineering, procurement, and business operations.
The results were measurable in dollars, time, confidence, and accountability.
The cartography model directly surfaced millions in potential savings by exposing misaligned workloads and underutilized environments.
Unlike previous cost initiatives, which relied on cloud-native telemetry alone, these savings were possible only because the team compared cloud, SaaS, and on-prem with unified financial logic.
CloudNuro enables this kind of normalized TCO modeling across hybrid workloads automatically.
With cartographic visibility, architectural planning shifted from weeks of stakeholder alignment to structured decision-making based on workload type, replatforming difficulty, and contract cycles.
This velocity gain didn’t just save time; it increased the quality of decisions and trust between departments.
One of the most transformational outcomes came when teams began benchmarking unit economics across hybrid environments. They moved beyond cost per VM or license and started asking:
These metrics reshaped prioritization. One platform team postponed a lift-and-shift when cartography showed that the cost per transaction would nearly double after cloud migration. Another team confidently moved to public cloud after modeling showed a 46% reduction in cost per data transformation.
CloudNuro enables this same depth of cost-to-value analysis, driven by context, not guesswork.
The hybrid cartography initiative improved governance without increasing friction. Because it unified visibility across business, finance, and engineering, it created a shared language:
As a result:
And leadership had a line of sight into where waste lived, where investment was justified, and which services deserved acceleration.
Before cartography, infrastructure conversations were marked by defensiveness. Engineers justified spending, finance questioned forecasts, and procurement challenged renewals. After cartography, those same discussions shifted tone.
Engineers could say, “We run on-prem because latency saves us 30% in upstream bandwidth.” Finance could say, “This SaaS app is overlicensed. Can we downgrade?” Procurement could say, “The contract renews in six months. Is this workload ready to shift?”
Because everyone was looking at the same map, with financial overlays and service intent, the bias was gone, the evidence was present, and the trust returned.
CloudNuro helps rebuild this alignment with transparent data models and cost allocation clarity across hybrid estates.
The cartography approach wasn’t just a one-off success; it’s a replicable blueprint for any enterprise navigating complex digital estates. Whether you're a media titan or an enterprise juggling on-prem assets and SaaS bloat, the learnings here provide actionable steps to operationalize FinOps across hybrid environments.
Jumping into cloud migrations or SaaS consolidation without visibility is a recipe for waste. This media organization proved that mapping application footprints across cost, architecture, and usage should precede any optimization initiative. Cartography isn’t a technical diagram. It’s a financial instrument. You need to know what you have, where it lives, and what it’s costing you across all environments.
CloudNuro delivers this visibility upfront, helping FinOps and IT leaders map before they move.
Not all workloads are meant for the cloud. Some depend on proximity, network latency, or contractual lock-in. By analyzing where a service falls in the OSI stack, teams can make smarter decisions about environment fit. For example, a workload heavy in Layer 4–7 operations might thrive in cloud-native platforms, while Layer 1–3 dependencies often perform better on-prem or edge.
FinOps isn’t about moving everything to the cloud; it’s about placing the right workload in the right place, for the correct cost.
Many enterprises ignore the on-prem cost in FinOps because it's capitalized or prepaid. Others ignore SaaS because it's "just licensing." But this team showed the power of comparing unit economics across all environments using normalized cost models. That’s how real FinOps maturity is achieved, when SaaS waste and on-prem overhead are managed with the same rigor as cloud spend.
CloudNuro helps teams unify cost data across SaaS, IaaS, and on-prem, turning fragmented views into a single financial truth.
Business Relationship Managers were instrumental in translating technical opportunity into procurement action. They brought contract timelines, renewal clauses, usage trends, and service ownership into the cartography model. Every FinOps program should enlist BRMs to act as connective tissue between architecture, finance, and vendor management.
FinOps tooling often floods teams with alerts, idle VMs, overprovisioned clusters, and spend spikes. But this case study proves that visual, contextual maps are more actionable. When a team sees that a service costs 60% more in the cloud versus on-prem, and that it’s scheduled for contract renewal, they make decisions. They don’t just acknowledge alerts; they act.
Some workloads are expensive but justified. Others are cheap but inefficient. The team’s cost cartography model factored in the cost-to-move, data gravity, dependencies, licensing constraints, as well as the operational cost. This nuance allowed them to sequence migrations logically, not emotionally. It also helped defer migrations that weren’t worth the engineering investment.
CloudNuro supports this by modeling cost impact, migration friction, and ownership readiness across your portfolio.
This case study isn’t about a media company; it’s about what’s possible when FinOps evolves from cost control to cost intelligence. By mapping application footprints, comparing costs across SaaS, cloud, and on-prem, and aligning workloads to OSI layers and business value, this enterprise made hybrid complexity actionable.
They didn’t eliminate on-prem. They didn’t abandon SaaS. They didn’t default to cloud.
They optimized across all three, with data, context, and shared visibility.
CloudNuro.ai enables this same transformation. Whether you're untangling redundant SaaS tools, trying to right-size cloud spend, or wondering if that on-prem system is still worth maintaining, we give you the visibility and control to:
You don’t need to wait for a crisis to start this. You need the correct map.
Want to replicate this transformation?
Book a free FinOps insights demo with CloudNuro.ai and see how hybrid cost cartography can unlock smarter decisions across your tech stack.
This transformation wasn’t driven by tooling alone. It was enabled by visibility, collaboration, and a willingness to rethink how hybrid architecture is planned and governed.
CloudNuro provides the foundation for this level of cross-platform visibility and financial accountability, out of the box.
This story was initially shared with the FinOps Foundation as part of their enterprise case study series.
Request a no cost, no obligation free assessment —just 15 minutes to savings!
Get Started
CloudNuro Corp
1755 Park St. Suite 207
Naperville, IL 60563
Phone : +1-630-277-9470
Email: info@cloudnuro.com
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