Case study
AWS bill, security and backup risks found during an infrastructure review
Not every AWS problem starts with an outage. Some environments become expensive, inconsistent and hard to trust over time. This case study outlines how a review turns unclear cloud risk into a practical action plan.
Context
A business was running production workloads on AWS using EC2, EBS, S3, Route 53, CloudFront and CloudWatch.
The customer wanted to know why costs were increasing and whether backups/security were good enough before making further changes.
The problem
- Unused or oversized resources were increasing monthly AWS spend.
- S3 buckets, snapshots and retention policies were not clearly documented.
- Security groups and IAM permissions had grown over time and needed review.
- CloudWatch monitoring existed in places, but alerts did not clearly cover the highest-risk failures.
Our approach
- Reviewed Cost Explorer/Billing, EC2, EBS, snapshots, S3 usage, CloudFront, Route 53 and CloudWatch configuration.
- Checked IAM and access patterns for obvious over-permissioning and unused users/keys.
- Identified backup gaps, retention issues and resources that needed cleanup or policy decisions.
- Prioritised findings into quick wins, risk fixes and changes that needed customer approval.
Practical outcomes
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