Easily build complex reports
Monitoring and efficiency metrics
Custom cost allocation tags
Network cost visibility
Organizational cost hierarchies
Budgeting and budget alerts
Discover active resources
Consumption-based insights
Alerts for unexpected charges
Automated AWS cost savings
Discover cost savings
Unified view of AWS discounts
COGS and business metrics
Model savings plans
Collaborate on cost initiatives
Create and manage your teams
Automate cloud infrastructure
Cloud cost issue tracking
Cloud data through AI
Detect cost spikes
Founded in 2015, VGS is The World’s Leader in Payment Tokenization and trusted credential management platform, depended on by Fortune 500 companies, merchants, fintechs, and banks alike. VGS’ mission is to revolutionize the way sensitive data is stored and secured, enabling organizations to manage information across cards, bank accounts, and digital wallets with ease. VGS stores sensitive data and tackles critical payment acceptance challenges such as multi-PSP management, card issuance, payment orchestration enablement, PCI compliance, and the protection of personally identifiable information (PII). With over 4 billion tokens managed globally, VGS offers a comprehensive suite of solutions, including a composable Card Management Platform, a PCI-compliant Vault, and advanced network value-added services such as Network Tokens, Account Updater, and Card Attributes.
“Our company is an AWS power user. We rely on a multitude of AWS services to build our product and serve our customers.” Binh Nguyen, VGS Cloud Operations Leader, said. That created a cost-tracking problem: As VGS grew, so did the company’s AWS usage. Provisioning new AWS products was easy from a technical standpoint, but little by little, the additional expenses were beginning to add up.
Resource tagging was one of Nguyen’s biggest headaches. Nguyen had been relying on AWS Cost Explorer to help him “slice and dice” cloud spend by team or by customers. But for that to work, developers had to apply team-specific tags to those instances as they were created. With a new tagging policy that hadn’t yet rolled out to all existing resources coupled with team architecture and tech stacks evolving over the years, this led to layers of tracking-related challenges.
Trying to hold teams accountable was becoming an increasing time burden for Nguyen. And without adequate visibility into which team was responsible for which cloud costs, problems were able to fester. “By the end of the month, you’d be like, ‘ We spent 10% more than we did last month. What happened?’” Nguyen said.
Nguyen was exploring solutions and evaluated a number of solutions but chose Vantage because of its ease of use and friendly user-interface. “At the end of the day, it was just intuitive, which means we can extract value out of it more quickly,” said Nguyen. “Other solutions required expertise with specific backend query languages,” he added. This would have taken time to develop, and potentially left VGS dependent on external technical support.
Additionally, cost was a factor. “This is one of the more affordable solutions,” Nguyen said of Vantage. “Vantage meshed a lot of our needs including cost which was a major factor for the VGS team.”
At the time VGS signed on with Vantage, only about 30% of its AWS resources were properly tagged. Unlike tagging with Cost Explorer, which requires consistent implementation from the moment of creation, Vantage’s virtual tagging system allowed Nguyen and the VGS team to search through the company’s AWS resources and apply tags retroactively based on keywords and other identifiers.
"Vantage Virtual Tagging quickly helped take us from 30% to 99%+ allocation of resources, because I had control. I didn't have to wait on the engineering teams to tag everything properly." Binh Nguyen, Cloud Operations Leader
After just a few weeks of focused work, Nguyen said, he’d gotten to a “99 percent allocation of all resources within AWS belonging to a team by virtual tag.” From there, dashboards were created for each individual team, which transferred responsibility for tracking resource spend off of Nguyen’s plate and onto team leaders.
“Ultimately, they need and want to be owning their own dashboards,” Nguyen said. “If they’re operating a business within a business, how much does it cost them to run their business? You don’t receive a blank check to provision anything you want.”
Virtual tagging helped Nguyen identify and eliminate inefficiencies adding up to thousands in monthly savings. “That’s recurring,” he emphasized. “So it’s paid for itself over time.” Beyond these direct financial savings, Vantage has also reduced time spent on operations. Before, he would spend hours preparing for monthly ops reviews. Now, all Nguyen has to do is review his dashboards and he’s ready to go.
The latest Vantage project was to implement budget alerts with Slack notifications to ensure teams are aware of increases in their spending before becoming a problem. “If it’s three-quarters of the way through the month and they’re more than 75% spent on their budget, then they’ll see ‘Okay, I’m at, say, 85% now. So what gives?’” Nguyen said. He’s also working on internal controls that require teams to tag their cloud entities as they’re created. “You kind of catch it at the start versus trying to chase people down at the end.”
Virtual tags also provided VGS with historical context for spending changes. “During our monthly ops reviews, I can say, ‘Hey, Team X, you went up 9%. Please explain why.’” Nguyen said. That information can be included in a note, which will help VGS understand how their spending is growing along with their business. Going forward, that will also reduce the time VGS spends investigating past decisions, thereby improving their future decision-making.
Vantage represents the beginning of a more mature phase in VGS’s business. “Teams can now remove me from the equation or the dependency,” Nguyen explained. “They can look at their infra costs in Vantage, and take action based on the insights.”
Perhaps most importantly, Vantage allows VGS to shift from reactive management to strategic governance. Rather than constantly chasing down untagged resources or preparing reports, the team can focus on higher-level initiatives like implementing unit cost-tracking. “VGS is progressively adopting a holistic FinOps strategy,” Nguyen said. “And Vantage is helping us get there.”