Would you spend $99 per month to save $15,000?

That’s effectively what Tristar Medical Group did. The company deployed a cloud scheduling tool to nearly halve cloud hosting costs by automatically shutting down Amazon Web Services incidences when they weren’t needed.

Tristar Medical Group is the largest privately owned health services provider in Australia, with 53 medical clinics and service locations. The company has a reputation for being on the leading edge of technology in an industry that has traditionally been a slow adopter. Five years ago, Tristar Medical ditched its client/server architecture for virtual desktop infrastructure from Citrix Systems Inc. VDI is an approach to end-user computing that manages desktops centrally and delivers them over a network instead of dispersing to each individual PC, thereby improving management control and better supporting mobile users.

With VDI securely in place, Chief Technology Officer Dewald Botha and his team made the decision to move the whole operation to the cloud in order to improve scalability and reduce maintenance chores. With a strong presence in Australia, Amazon was a natural choice.

It quickly became apparent, though, that the complexity of the group’s scheduling needs would demand a lot of infrastructure fine-tuning. For example, some servers need to available to medical centers at all hours while others can be safely spun down when clinics are closed. Leaving every instance on all the time would be throwing money away. “If you don’t manage Amazon carefully, it can get quite expensive,” Botha said.

The choice was either to make a large capital investment in better VDI efficiency or to optimize the use of AWS. Tristar Medical chose the latter. The IT organization went looking for a tool to automate the process of bringing server instances up and down. It found some elegant and expensive solutions that offered scheduling as a subset of other services. Even so, he said, “we figured that the more complexity in the product, the more difficult it would be to manage.”

Then they hit upon ParkMyCloud Inc. It permits organizations to turn their AWS instances on and off automatically on whatever schedule they choose. The service easily accommodates multiple time zones and AWS accounts with management from a single dashboard. Signup was easy, pricing was transparent and savings were immediate: Tristar Medical was able to nearly halve its AWS usage, saving more than $15,000 per month. With ParkMyCloud priced between $1 and $2.50 per instance per month, the total monthly bill added up to less than $100. That’s a return on investment of 15,000 percent.

There were also ancillary savings as the group found that it could more efficiently manage its Citrix software license costs by reducing concurrent users. So when one clinic finishes work for the day, its licenses can be released for people in other clinics to use.

Tristar Medical also uses load-balancing software, user and group policies to minimize server under-utilization. Privacy and security are important considerations in the medical field, and the integration between ParkMyCloud and Amazon’s identity access management policies ensures a clear division between what can and can’t be accessed.

Sometimes, a simple solution delivers the biggest bang for the buck. “ParkMyCloud does only one thing,” Botha said, “but they do it very well.”