Overview
- Client: Blackhawk Network (BHN)
- Industry: Financial Services / Payments
- Cloud Provider: AWS
- Challenge: Growing cloud costs across a complex payments infrastructure
Blackhawk Network, a global leader in branded payments and incentive solutions, operates a cloud infrastructure that supports billions of dollars in transactions annually. As cloud spend grew alongside business expansion, the team needed a more effective approach to identifying and eliminating waste without disrupting critical payment processing systems.
The Challenge
BHN's cloud environment supports high-availability payment processing with strict performance and compliance requirements. Traditional cost optimization approaches were too blunt for this context -- generic recommendations to downsize instances or eliminate resources required extensive investigation before anyone could act on them with confidence.
The team faced several specific challenges:
- High-stakes remediation -- Any changes to production infrastructure needed validated safety guarantees
- Cross-team coordination -- Optimization opportunities spanned multiple engineering teams with different priorities
- Limited engineering bandwidth -- Engineers needed clear, actionable recommendations rather than raw data
- Complex service dependencies -- Interconnected services made it difficult to assess the impact of changes
The Solution
BHN deployed PointFive to provide continuous efficiency monitoring with the engineering context needed to act safely and quickly. The platform's approach addressed their core concerns:
Contextual recommendations -- Each finding included ownership attribution, workload context, and validated remediation steps, enabling engineers to assess and implement changes with confidence.
Workflow integration -- Recommendations were routed directly to responsible teams through existing ticketing and communication tools, reducing the coordination overhead that had previously slowed optimization efforts.
Safe remediation -- PointFive's recommendations included risk assessment and rollback procedures, critical for an environment where availability directly impacts revenue.
Results
Within weeks of deployment, PointFive identified meaningful savings opportunities that previous tools had not surfaced, while providing the safety guarantees BHN required for their critical payments infrastructure.
- Rapid time-to-value with significant savings identified in the first weeks
- Engineering adoption driven by trusted, context-rich recommendations
- Continuous discovery of new optimization opportunities as infrastructure evolves
- Compliance-friendly approach that respects the constraints of regulated environments
Conclusion
For organizations operating critical infrastructure, cloud cost optimization must balance efficiency with safety. PointFive's contextual, engineering-focused approach enabled BHN to achieve meaningful savings without compromising the reliability their business demands.