The Global EY organization saves $6 million and unlocks new potential revenue stream by helping optimize its tax solution on Microsoft Azure

Professional services provider the Global EY organization (EY) unified its Global Tax Platform for Financial Services (GTP-FS) tax offering and shortened the time to market by helping create a cloud solution for US enterprise clients who use its detailed tax and compliance services. However, the organization still found it difficult to onboard new clients and wanted better visibility into the cost and performance of its cloud systems. “We have 40 to 50 products deployed on GTP-FS,” says Vinod Kevaliya, Senior Manager at Ernst and Young LLP United States. “We approached Microsoft and said, ‘We want to scale the Ernst and Young solution to support 3,000 clients.’”

EY has long used Microsoft technology to provide services to its clients, so that’s where it turned to explore optimizing GTP-FS. Microsoft experts recommended the Azure Well-Architected Framework embedded into the EY Fabric platform to make the tax solution more secure, effective, and cost-efficient. Along the way, EY identified many opportunities to enhance the performance of GTP-FS. Within months, the organization had decommissioned more than 800 underutilized cloud resources, leading to an estimated $6 million in cost savings. “In collaboration with Microsoft, we’ve crafted a powerful cloud cost-optimization framework on our technology acceleration platform GTP-FS,” says Nate Hanafy, Financial Services Office (FSO) Tax Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Partner at Ernst and Young LLP United States. “It’s helped us achieve swift client onboarding, autoscale the GTP-FS platform, and meet tight time-to-market objectives.”

Using Power BI to empower decision-makers

EY supports a significant portion of the US enterprise tax and compliance market, and to maintain and grow its market share, it must continue to provide leading-class services. The organization developed GTP-FS to meet the need for a data offering and a connected suite of modern tax compliance products. It envisioned a single cohesive and shareable solution that would set the pace for the entire industry. Yet as GTP-FS grew over three years, EY also saw the need for greater visibility into important metrics, such as the number of subscriptions, resource usage, and overall cost tracking, to efficiently onboard new clients. “We formed a strategic committee to look at the solution as a whole, validate the current state, find the opportunity areas, and use Microsoft capabilities to make it better,” says Kevaliya.

The Azure Well-Architected Framework was embedded into EY Fabric, helping take GTP-FS to the next level. By implementing Power BI, the organization visualized resource use across its estate. Now, decision-makers can see which work groups are using cloud services and tie spending directly to their performance. Empowered by this information, EY leaders can make informed decisions about technology investments and business processes. These insights play an equally important role in planning and forecasting, which impacts not only the tax and compliance line but also broader corporate operations. And, of course, cost optimization is an ongoing process.

Reducing cloud hosting costs by 40% in collaboration with Microsoft

Before starting its optimization push, EY was using a labor-intensive manual process to track the cost of the cloud services that power GTP-FS. At the same time, growing hosting costs were limiting the organization’s ability to onboard new clients. EY realized that better architecture would result in a more efficient and effective offering. “In the cloud, even a single misconfiguration can lead to significant additional costs,” says Kevaliya. “For example, we worked with Microsoft to change our log analytics. And that’s just one component.” 

Enhancing visibility into EY’s cloud architecture and making targeted changes cut total GTP-FS cloud hosting costs by 40 percent, and the organization is reinvesting those resources in innovation. The goal is to improve the services of expanded capabilities to both internal teams and clients. “Understanding the largest cost drivers of our cloud deployment helped us focus on the most impactful areas of correction,” says Johann Weder, Chief Architect and Senior Manager of FSO Tax at Ernst and Young LLP United States. “We gained new insights into our deployment, paving the way for new, improved architectures that are both cost-effective and secure.” 

Along with providing business value, the enhanced architecture has also helped in creating a more technically robust solution. The new modular GTP-FS infrastructure has made it easier for EY teams to use low-code and no-code tools from Microsoft Azure Data Factory. “We’re happy to be working with Microsoft because with Azure Data Factory and Power BI, we don’t have to sit down and script the analytics layer,” says Kevaliya.

With a solution that follows Azure best practices, EY is poised for growth. “Our EY Fabric platform, built on Azure, has allowed us to gain profound insights and to help optimize not just scalability but also cost efficiency,” says Kevaliya. With many aspects of the onboarding experience now automated, clients are getting set up within hours rather than the two weeks it used to take. The company’s teams are excited to both improve customer satisfaction and drive bottom-line growth. 

Collaborating with Microsoft to discover new opportunities 

Now that it has a leaner, more reliable service, EY is ready to take the next step in its innovation journey. The organization wants to use AI to help its leaders identify opportunities to reduce spending and enhance services. EY is also adopting the architecture-leading practices it used to optimize GTP-FS across other service lines to keep driving cost savings. “With support from Microsoft, we have the confidence to keep innovating,” says Kevaliya. 

Reflecting on their journey, EY leaders emphasize the role that collaboration plays in the cloud. “Microsoft was our collaborator,” says Kevaliya. “We recommend being transparent about your challenges and sharing your goals. That will help you achieve a meaningful outcome.”