Social housing · AWS
A UK housing association
The client came to Cloudreason with an internal proposal already on the table: approximately £1 million to be spent on storage hardware, with no clear strategy behind the figure. They wanted a second opinion before signing it off.
The problem
Storage proposals of this kind follow a familiar pattern. A genuine need (backups that must be kept, retention obligations that must be met) gets translated directly into a hardware quote, sized for the worst case, with headroom on top. The number looks authoritative because it’s itemised. But it commits the organisation to a large capital outlay for capacity it may never fill, plus the quieter costs that follow hardware around: hosting, power, maintenance contracts, staff time, and a refresh bill in five to seven years when the equipment ages out. For a housing association, every pound of that is a pound not spent on its actual purpose.
The deeper problem is that the organisation was being asked to make a million-pound infrastructure decision without independent advice. Most of the parties in a storage purchase, the vendor, the reseller and often the integrator, are paid more when the client spends more. Nobody in that chain is rewarded for saying “buy nothing.”
What we did
Our advice was not to buy it.
We started with the questions the hardware quote had skipped: what data actually needed protecting, what the retention requirements really were, and what recovery objectives the organisation genuinely had to meet, in terms of how quickly, and to what point in time, it would need its data back after a failure. Sized against those answers rather than against a worst case with margin, the requirement looked very different.
We then designed a backup solution built on AWS S3 and established third-party backup tooling. S3 suits this problem almost perfectly: it is designed for eleven-nines durability, replicates data across multiple facilities as standard, charges only for what is actually stored, and offers archive tiers that make long-retention backup data cheap to keep. There is no capacity to pre-purchase, no array to maintain, and no refresh cycle.
Crucially, the solution was designed from the outset to be operated by the client’s own IT team, with no ongoing external support required. That last part was deliberate: a solution the client can run themselves is a solution they genuinely own, and designing ourselves out of the picture was part of the brief we set ourselves.
The results
Over a typical five-year hardware lifecycle, the result costs a small fraction of the proposed £1 million spend, with none of the capital outlay, none of the operational overhead of physical infrastructure, and no refresh bill waiting at the end of it. The organisation’s team runs it day to day without us.
We are not paid by AWS, and we don’t resell what we recommend. The £1 million this client didn’t spend is the clearest illustration of why that matters.
What made it work
We are not paid by vendors, so we have no reason to recommend a purchase. Advising a client out of a £1 million spend is only possible when your revenue does not depend on it going ahead.
Why this client isn't named
This is a real engagement with real numbers. We don't name clients on our website because we'd rather they weren't fielding sales calls for appearing here. If you'd like more detail, ask us and, where the client is happy, we'll arrange a direct conversation or reference.