The challenge

Like many organizations, Oxford University Press (OUP), the largest university press in the world, faced COVID-19-related challenges such as efficiently operating in a remote working environment while meeting the significant demand for digital services. OUP had digital transformation programs in place across the organization, however the company wanted to enhance its processes and decrease multicloud spend so that it could deliver what global customers needed at the right time and through the right channel. OUP engaged nLoops to meet its goals of sustainably accelerating its digital transformation program and driving better user experiences with optimized customer-facing applications. Ultimately, the company needed a unified view of critical applications and performance across its digital landscape to drive operational efficiencies. OUP also wanted to achieve a positive ROI on its application performance management tools and address cloud infrastructure challenges, such as high costs and oversizing

Our approach

nLoops conducted a comprehensive investigation and evaluation of tools already in use and created a roadmap to implement an enterprise-wide strategy for observability and availability. We created an innovative solution that integrated various monitoring tools, critical application logs and provided a unified single pane of glass (dashboard), so that the company could easily see the status of business services in various portfolios within the organization.

In addition, our cloud optimization methodology provided a structured framework for cloud cost management. We provided guidance not only for the company’s operations but also for its architecture, governance, application development and financial operations (FinOps) functions. Using this structured approach, we set priorities, involved key stakeholders and determined the organizational changes required to develop, maintain and run FinOps for OUP’s entire cloud estate. We also performed an AppDynamics gap analysis across the customer landscape to ensure end-to-end coverage

Driving maximum value from technology investments

Our solutions helped OUP improve time to market, avoid downtime, perform more proactively and gain a unified view of the company’s critical apps and performance across its digital landscape. With improved applications and enhanced business service performance, teams can conduct proactive analyses on business trends to act before incidents happen. As a result, the operations teams increased productivity, and the optimization of application performance management tools and cloud spend helped OUP save a total of £1.7M in costs. Reducing and optimizing the company’s cloud spend also helped OUP reduce its global carbon footprint and achieve its sustainability goals