Driving cloud cost accountability

Technology is mission‑critical to Treasury Wine Estates well beyond traditional enterprise IT. Highly automated, human‑free cellar environments rely on machines and control systems to store, move, and rotate barrels with precision, while industrial systems manage grape intake and processing during vintage. In peak harvest conditions, even short delays can impact wine quality — grapes cannot afford to sit in the South Australian sun waiting for systems to respond. As a result, Treasury Wine Estates has adopted a “cloud smart” approach, operating a hybrid environment with a large AWS footprint complemented by smaller Azure usage and on‑premises and edge systems, placing workloads where performance, reliability, operational risk, and cost efficiency are best balanced.

As Treasury Wine Estates increased its reliance on AWS, cloud spend grew across a distributed account structure aligned to applications and teams. While this supported flexibility and scaling, it also introduced significant financial complexity.

At the time, FinOps maturity was low. Cost analysis primarily used native tooling, which limited visibility into overall spend and made it more challenging to identify the most impactful optimization opportunities. Tagging practices changed over time, affecting allocation consistency, and cloud cost management activities were largely concentrated within the infrastructure team.

These limitations became more pressing as the organization approached an AWS contract renewal.

Treasury Wine Estates needed to move quickly from fragmented visibility to a clear, shared understanding of cloud costs, enabling application teams to take greater ownership without disrupting critical enterprise systems.

To support greater cost transparency and ownership across teams, Treasury Wine Estates implemented IBM® Cloudability®, bringing together cloud cost and usage data across its AWS and Azure environments—creating the visibility needed to move quickly from insight to execution.

Centralized visibility across AWS accounts
IBM Cloudability consolidated cost and usage data across all AWS accounts, providing a centralized and consistent view of cloud spend across a distributed AWS estate. With a clearer breakdown of costs across services and components, teams were able to move beyond high‑level totals and better understand what was driving spend. “Once we could actually see how our cloud costs were made up, it became much easier to have the right conversations,” said Hargenrader.

Accurate allocation and showback
While AWS accounts were broadly aligned to applications, allocation gaps remained due to inconsistent tagging and shared services. Using Tag Mapping and Business Mapping, Treasury Wine Estates normalized years of inconsistent metadata and applied business rules to allocate costs fully—without requiring disruptive changes to existing infrastructure.

This enabled consistent showback aligned to applications and teams, allowing stakeholders to clearly understand the financial impact of their cloud usage. “We could go right down to individual components and have very concrete conversations about cost and optimization,” said Rohan Power, Manager, Cloud & Infrastructure Platform.

Cloud cost optimization at the application level
With cost allocation and visibility in place, Treasury Wine Estates shifted optimization discussions from aggregate cloud spend to the specific applications, components, and services teams were responsible for running.

The team prioritized usage and hygiene improvements, including decommissioning unused EC2 instances, removing orphaned EBS volumes, and cleaning up obsolete snapshots and AMIs.

Backup and retention policies were re‑evaluated in collaboration with application owners, allowing the team to fine tune RPO and RTO requirements and deliver recurring savings that compound over time. “Even small changes, when you look over three or four years, really add up,” said Power.

Rightsizing recommendations became actionable at scale through consolidated visibility across accounts, allowing teams to validate usage patterns over time and make changes with confidence that performance and reliability would not be compromised.

Cloudability also highlighted inefficient networking configurations, helping teams uncover approximately $30,000 per month in avoidable networking costs and to prioritize remediation with clear financial context.

Treasury Wine Estates exceeded its original savings mandate using IBM Cloudability. The organization identified $1.4 million or more in validated, recurring annual AWS savings, surpassing the initial $1 million target.

“Not only did we find the million dollars — we’re tracking well beyond it,” said Hargenrader. These results also informed AWS commitment planning ahead of renewal, improving confidence in commitment levels and avoiding over‑committing on inefficient usage patterns.

Rather than immediately implementing chargeback, Treasury Wine Estates introduced consistent showback using Cloudability dashboards and reports. This embedded cost conversations into delivery, optimization, and migration workflows and helped drive a cultural shift. “It’s changed the culture,” said Power. “Cloud spend is no longer a black box or someone else’s problem.”

With a solid FinOps foundation in place, Treasury Wine Estates is continuing to evolve its cloud cost management approach. Next priorities include expanding Cloudability access to additional teams, introducing dedicated FinOps roles funded by realized savings, and extending cost transparency into broader total cost of ownership and business value discussions — reinforcing a virtuous cycle of accountability, optimization, and reinvestment.

Treasury Wine Estates is a global wine company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, with operations spanning Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The company manages a portfolio of premium and luxury wine brands, including Penfolds, and employs thousands of people worldwide across production, supply chain, sales, and corporate functions.