From cloud sprawl to smart savings: Bluecurrent and Datacom

• Datacom helped Bluecurrent transform a complex, inherited AWS environment into a streamlined, resilient platform, delivering $638,000 in annualised savings while the footprint continued to grow. 

• The optimisation project strengthened Bluecurrent’s security posture, governance and financial discipline. 

• A close partnership and an engineering‑led approach saw Datacom’s AWS consultants work side by side with Bluecurrent’s teams to standardise architecture, retire technical debt and embed ongoing optimisation practices.

For Bluecurrent, cloud optimisation was never just about reducing cost. With Datacom’s support, the company reshaped a complex AWS environment into a more secure, resilient and efficient platform for growth. 

Bluecurrent owns or manages around 2.8 million advanced smart meters across New Zealand and Australia, generating high‑volume data streams every few minutes that must be processed under strict service level agreements (SLAs) for energy retailers and network companies.   

“We operate a seven‑by‑24 mission‑critical environment for our customers, a very high‑performance data environment, processing complex calculations and transformations on well over 2 billion meter intervals per day,” says Bluecurrent Chief Technology Officer, Mike Hendry.  

Having spun out from a larger business, Bluecurrent inherited a large and complex AWS environment, comprising more than 60 AWS accounts and 95 virtual private clouds (VPCs).  

Complexity, overlapping network ranges, governance gaps and technical debt created an opportunity – and urgency – to improve resilience, security and cost efficiency. 

Hendry’s team saw cloud optimisation not as a cost‑cutting exercise, but as a way to enable higher‑quality, faster delivery at lower cost.  

“In these sorts of projects, you are usually told you can only achieve two of those three things,” says Hendry. “But it is possible to have all three. It's a virtuous cycle when it happens.” 

“Cloud optimisation is rarely just about reducing spend,” says Datacom Director Cloud, Mike Walls. “The real opportunity is to simplify complexity, strengthen resilience and create a platform that supports future growth and that's what the team set out to achieve." 

Datacom, as Bluecurrent’s cloud operations and managed services partner, recognised the opportunity to reset the AWS environment and initiated a structured AWS Cost and Architecture Optimisation review. 

That led to an initial three-month project working side by side with Bluecurrent, to standardise network architecture, retire 16 VPCs, reduce overlapping VPC ranges and simplify operations in the AWS environment.  

The team deployed AWS Security Hub and GuardDuty organisation‑wide, increased firewall coverage, reduced the EC2 fleet by 18 servers, removed unused database instances and snapshots, halved CloudWatch log storage costs and cut AWS Lambda compute usage by 59%. This became a foundation for a roadmap towards AWS Control Tower adoption and ongoing governance improvements. 

“The best optimisation projects are highly collaborative,” says Datacom’s Practice Lead for AWS, Dinesh Sharma. “We worked alongside Bluecurrent's team to identify opportunities, prioritise what would deliver the greatest impact and implement changes that improved cost, security and operational efficiency together. Our focus is on helping customers implement the changes that create lasting value.” 

An agile delivery model, shared backlog tracking and regular stakeholder workshops kept the project on track. 

“It’s fair to say Datacom’s AWS consultants are extremely well-versed in the AWS environment,” says Hendry.  

“They obviously wanted to drive really hard to deliver the benefits for us. It’s a team that’s almost evangelical about the process.” 

The trifecta of desired outcomes was rapidly realised. From August to December 2025, the optimisation delivered annualised savings of $637,694, despite continued platform growth over the same period.  

“We essentially exceeded, from an annualised run‑rate perspective, what we thought we were going to be able to, and nearly hit our in-year savings target in a short period of time,” says Hendry. 

Those financial gains were matched by security improvements and risk reductions. The clean‑up of redundant and overly permissive resources fed directly into Bluecurrent’s cyber risk register, allowing the team to prioritise and tick off issues in parallel.  

Bluecurrent needed financial discipline and architectural hygiene to support emerging AI and “agentic” workloads drawing on data from its smart meter network. The optimisation work helped the company embed core practices – project budgeting, standardised network building blocks and strict attention to data volumes. 

For Hendry, the project proved the value of a focussed partner that can bring goal‑directed rigour to cloud optimisation.  

“We knew we had a fixed window and we were ruthless in the prioritisation of the things that we tackled so that we could deliver the benefits that we wanted. Without Datacom, we would not have gotten there,” he says. 

Datacom remains a strategic partner for Bluecurrent across outsourcing, project work, Salesforce development and ongoing management of its AWS platform.  

“Datacom is very customer-centric,” says Hendry. 

“They’ll modify their processes to support their customers’ needs, and they’re highly responsive. I think across the Australasian market, particularly among larger IT partners, that makes them stand out.”