Snowflake Cost Optimisation for a FTSE 100 financial institution
A leading FTSE 100 firm had seen their Snowflake cost increase exponentially over three years. Affinity Reply designed and implemented a snowflake optimisation plan which reduced large amounts of unnecessary costs.
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Optimising Snowflake Consumption Through Governance and Visibility
THE SCENARIO
Rapid Platform Growth Without Governance
An FTSE 100 financial institution had adopted Snowflake as their central data platform to power analytics, regulatory reporting, and investment operations. Over a three year period, usage grew organically across the organisation with no formal governance in place. Multiple teams independently, ran large and unoptimised queries, and accumulated vast volumes of stale data without any cost awareness or accountability. Auto-clustering ran unchecked on tables rarely queried, storage grew with redundant clones and datasets well past their useful life.
What had started as a manageable Snowflake bill rapidly escalated to an excessive amount, with no corresponding increase in demonstrable business value. Leadership recognised the trajectory was unsustainable. In order to resolve these issues, Affinity Reply were brought in to investigate and propose Snowflake cost optimisation solutions.
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THE CHALLENGE
Reducing Costs Without Disrupting the Business
The firm lacked visibility into who was consuming what, had no cost allocation model linking spend to business outcomes, and faced mounting C-Suite pressure to reduce cloud data platform spend — without impacting critical business operations, investment analytics pipelines, or time-sensitive regulatory reporting obligations.
Spend was fragmenting across five distinct cost vectors — storage proliferation, oversized compute warehouses, inefficient queries and unnecessary auto-clustering — each compounding independently with no single owner accountable.
Addressing Cloud Cost Challenges
The initiative tackles rising cloud costs lacking transparency, predictability, and governance across Snowflake services.
Strategic Objectives Overview
Focus on transparency, governance aligned with FinOps, and immediate cost optimisations without compromising performance.
Long-term Organisational Impact
Programme represents a shift to proactive cost management embedding accountability and scalability for future growth.
THE SOLUTION
Creating Complete Cost Transparency
Affinity Reply conducted a comprehensive Snowflake cost and usage assessment structured around five targeted optimisation areas, designed to createfull transparency and deliver actionable recommendations with sustainable governance.
Query performance analysis identifying the most expensive and inefficient query patterns, redundant computation, and missing resource controls
Warehouse compute profiling across all business units, mapping utilisation rates against provisioned capacity and identifying consolidation opportunities
Storage audit examining data lifecycle, cloning practices, data redundancy overhead, and identification of stale or unused datasets across all environments
Auto-clustering review assessing clustering key configurations against actual query patterns and access frequency to identify unnecessary background credit consumption
Affinity Reply built a detailed cost attribution model mapping every cost of spend to specific business units, optimisation areas, and usecases, then played back findings to both business and technology stakeholders through monitoring dashboards
Centralised Governance
Platform
The Snowflake Control Tower centralises governance with role-specific dashboards for efficient monitoring by stakeholders.
Formal Governance
Processes
New governance processes and cost forums ensure proactive financial oversight and accountability.
Consumption Control
Policy
The policy sets mandatory guardrails on resource usage, reducing ambiguity and managing exceptions.
Clear Operating
Model
Segregation of duties clarifies ownership between platform, operations and engineering teams to maximise accountability.
THE OUTCOME
Delivering Sustainable Cost Savings
Comprehensive Usage Visibility
Achieved unified visibility into Snowflake usage enabling stakeholders to monitor consumption and cost drivers clearly.
FinOps Governance Framework
Introduced FinOps-aligned governance embedding cost management into platform leadership and operational maturity.
Significant Cost Savings
Delivered six-figure annual savings by optimising storage, compute, and serverless service consumption.
~$750,000 annualised savings.
Cultural Shift and Collaboration
Enhanced collaboration between engineering and finance through increased cost-awareness and clear governance processes.
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