Box Boosts Growth and Unpacks over $2.23 Million in Savings

Distributed and remote workforce models continue to be popular, because they help businesses widen their talent pools while empowering employees with greater flexibility. As technology advances at lightning speed, there’s no sign of demand slowing for services that make it simpler for people to collaborate from anywhere and from any device. From secure file sharing to automated workflows, Box’s central content platform is powering how the world works together. Taking direction from its cloud-first vision and strategy, Box wanted to streamline costs on cloud infrastructure so that it could successfully meet strategic aims.

Working backward from Box’s ambitions and challenges, AWS Solutions Architects conducted several deep-dive business reviews with Box leadership to identify ways of reducing cloud spend. At the core of Box’s cost optimization journey lay the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which helps companies understand the pros and cons of their decisions while building systems on AWS. The AWS Well-Architected Framework helped Box transform its ways of working, in particular in growing awareness of expenditure, matching supply with demand, focusing on cost-effective resources, and facilitating effective monitoring over time.

When it comes to cloud resources, many companies adopt a “just in case” mindset—loading up on capacity and features. Yet that approach often leads to idle resources and unnecessary expenditure. By embracing best practices, service deep dives, and business reviews, Box could maximize economies of scale in the cloud and prevent overprovisioning. Box’s work with AWS Solutions Architects revealed three areas where targeted strategies could have the biggest impact on Box’s business: data transfer, storage, and logging.

When approaching data transfer costs, Box had two main categories to consider: inter-Availability Zone (inter-AZ) traffic and internet egress traffic in the Asia Pacific and Europe regions. For inter-AZ traffic, hands-on workshops with AWS helped Box discover architecture gaps and strategies for localizing data access. The result was a minimization of costs for data transfer between AZs and savings of 438,000 dollars. For internet egress traffic, Box’s engineering team employed intelligent application routing to bypass internet gateways where appropriate, saving over 1.1 million dollars per year while improving download speeds for users.

Box’s engineering teams also had multiple sessions with AWS to maximize the value of AWS storage services. Given the diverse nature of its workloads, Box took a tiered-storage approach that aligned with the varying access patterns and life cycles of its data. Accordingly, for low-latency access to frequently retrieved data, Box used the standard classes of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere, while Amazon S3 Glacier storage classes—which are purpose-built for data archiving—were used for cost-effective long-term storage of archived data. With Amazon S3, Box can opt for aging data to be automatically migrated to lower-cost storage classes.

Another crucial aspect of Box’s storage optimization was the proactive matching of specific application needs to volume types on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), simple to use, high performance block storage at any scale. Box deleted unattached or underutilized volumes, so it only pays for the storage it actively uses. Box also closely analyzed its snapshot usage patterns to reduce unnecessary costs while maintaining backups. Those efforts amounted to annual savings of over 500,000 dollars.

Lastly, logging was essential for Box’s governance but could have quickly become a cost burden if not managed effectively. Box was managing its governance and audits using AWS CloudTrail, a service for tracking user activity and API usage on AWS and in hybrid and multicloud environments, but it needed to strike a balance between visibility and cost. Through the use of events filtering, appropriate use of event types, and reduction of high volume activities, Box saw another 192,000 dollars in yearly cost savings.

Now that Box has realized large benefits from the AWS Well-Architected Framework, its horizons have been broadened. “Our use of AWS best practices led to savings of over 2 million dollars, setting a new baseline and paving the way for our Box Zones migration project,” says Clay Alvord, director of FinOps and SRE at Box. Box has begun building on its cloud-first vision by investing in new AWS workloads, with the goal of obtaining game-changing capabilities through technologies such as generative artificial intelligence. Moreover, the impact of Box’s cloud project has empowered it to expand into new international regions, including Asia Pacific and Europe.

More generally, by optimizing its use of AWS services, Box is improving the user experience with low-latency and faster download speeds. In grounding its efforts in the AWS Well-Architected Framework, Box has achieved savings without compromising on security, reliability, and performance. With the stronger monitoring capabilities and enterprise-grade security of AWS services, Box is upholding its promise to help customers manage their content securely and reliably.