About
The client runs its digital estate on AWS. Like many organisations of its scale, it had handed day-to-day operations to an incumbent managed-service provider on a fixed monthly retainer. The arrangement covered availability and best-effort response. It did not cover outcomes.
Routine operations funnelled through in-house engineers. Patching, capacity management, service requests and triage competed for the same pool of people. Higher-value work waited.
Meanwhile, risk accumulated quietly in the background: long-open security findings, end-of-life database engines, functions running on retired runtimes, and misconfigured storage, built up without anyone going looking.
Challenge
The client needed something the incumbent was not delivering: a secure, cost-optimised environment that largely ran itself. The requirement was equal or lower cost, no additional headcount, and no disruption to what was already working.
Success was defined up front across four dimensions: service continuity and cost; security and compliance; operational efficiency; and visibility and predictability.
Rather than present a proposal alone, the organisation wanted proof inside its own AWS account, with full control over what could auto-execute, what needed sign-off, and what was blocked entirely.
Solution
Firemind ran a live deployment of the IT Operating Engine on the development and QA estate over a single quarter. Every action was logged; the client approved anything high-risk and retained governance throughout.
Following Firemind’s connect-scan-heal-monitor model, the engine plugged into existing security and observability tooling, built a live map of the estate, and resolved real incidents end to end. The deployment proved three things that proposals cannot:
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Incidents resolved, not restarted. Faced with a high-CPU incident, the engine isolated and killed the offending process instead of rebooting the host. It traced a silent-failure case through logs and AWS Systems Manager to clear a stalled queue in seconds. A cross-account database clone that hit networking and encryption issues spawned parallel fixes and re-ran successfully, with no human in the loop.
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Security noise turned into verdicts. The engine analysed around 30,000 findings into engineer-ready verdicts, not a backlog of tickets to sift through. It remediated misconfigurations under human approval, closing exposure that had been open for years.
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Whole-estate assessment. A full AWS Well-Architected Review covered more than 2,000 resources across all six pillars, prioritising the findings that mattered most, including critical resilience gaps in the production database tier.
None of this ran unchecked. The client held full control throughout.
Results
The deployment ran on the development and QA estate over one quarter. Scale projections across the full estate and wider group are available on request and will be confirmed as the engagement extends.
- Years of standing risk closed: long-dormant findings, end-of-life database engines, retired runtimes and storage misconfigurations addressed during the run
- Around 30,000 security findings triaged into actionable verdicts, plus a full six-pillar Well-Architected Review across more than 2,000 resources, without adding to the team’s workload
- FinOps savings identified recoup roughly two-thirds of the coverage fee in the first year, before right-sizing and freed engineering time are counted
- Continuous security, FinOps and operational coverage alongside the incumbent, with no disruption or migration risk, at a fraction of the incumbent’s monthly spend
The client’s engineers spend less time on routine toil and escalations. The estate runs secure, optimised and production-ready.
