Case Study: Social Security Scotland achieves major cloud cost savings with IBM Consulting

Social Security Scotland partners with IBM and Nordcloud to lead the way in reimagining cloud costs at government level

Social Security Scotland, an executive agency of the Scottish Government, needed better control over rapidly growing cloud costs on AWS. As cloud usage expanded, it lacked visibility into spending, resource utilization, and cost attribution across teams, making it difficult to manage budgets while continuing to deliver public services efficiently. IBM helped address these challenges through a FinOps transformation with IBM Cloudability and consulting support.

IBM and Nordcloud implemented a tailored FinOps operating model with IBM Cloudability, showback reporting, custom analysis, and engineering improvements to improve transparency, accountability, and security. The results were strong: Social Security Scotland achieved 390% ROI in 18 months, cut cloud spend by 30.4% in the first year, and delivered 36% lower core business cloud costs, with 78% of savings driven by usage optimization.

Social Security Scotland