Case Study · Public sector · Government
Transport for NSW reduced Azure data lake OpEx by 22%.
Its transport data platform captures vehicle telemetry every 10 seconds. CloudMonitor helped reduce the cost of retaining and analyzing that data while protecting performance.
About the customer
Transport for NSW
The state government agency that runs public transport across New South Wales — buses, trains, ferries, light rail and metro — serving millions of journeys every day.
Results at a glance
The outcome was measurable at the data-platform level.
22%
Data Lake Azure spend reduction
5 TB+
Vehicle telemetry per week
10 sec
Vehicle location ping interval
The cost decision
Data retention had become a material operating cost.
Historical GTFS data was costly to retain and analyze. Each TfNSW vehicle sends its location every 10 seconds, creating more than 5 TB of data each week.
Without that history, the team could not reliably investigate past trips, predict delays, optimize routes, or report on service performance. The decision was not whether to keep the data; it was how to keep it at a sustainable cost.
Before CloudMonitor
Cost ownership could not keep up with telemetry.
Allocation, reporting, and resource ownership were preventing timely decisions.
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An immature tagging policy made cost allocation difficult.
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The business lacked a direct view of platform spend.
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IT had to calculate and distribute cost reports.
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DEV and UAT contained zombie and orphaned resources with no known owner.
The FinOps response
Start with unowned resources and oversized capacity.
A consultant used CloudMonitor to find orphaned resources that were no longer in use but were still incurring cost. Removing them prevented further unnecessary spend.
The team then right-sized virtual machines and services against demand, and reviewed reserved-instance options for storage and Databricks compute.
The Program Manager subscribed to monthly Budget versus Forecasting reports and received real-time cost-anomaly alerts through the CloudMonitor Teams bot.
The result
A 22% reduction in Azure data lake spend.
TfNSW used FinOps practices in its data-management work and achieved a 22% reduction in data lake costs, while retaining the data needed to improve transport services.
Key results
Right-sized resources
Recommendations identified over-provisioned resources for review.
Cost anomaly detection
Real-time alerts made cost spikes visible sooner.
Improved cost governance
The project team could subscribe to cost reports.
Related FinOps Domains
Transport for NSW found that customers first and foremost wanted to Understand Cloud Usage and Cost.
As Azure expenses rose, the team matched workload requirements to the cloud services used. This highlighted the significance of Cloud Usage Optimization.
Reservation/RI Recommendations are part of the Cloud Rate Optimization domain.
TfNSW needed a solution to capture real-time data for every vehicle in motion across the state. This solution just gives us that so that we mine nuggets from this data. As you can imagine, this has resulted in a lot of data, which is costly to store!
Sandeep Mathur
Program Manager, Transport for NSW
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