How The Nationwide Group Cut AWS Costs by 49% and Modernized Legacy Systems with Borealis Solutions

Written By Brendon Palmer

Industry: Real Estate & Property Appraisal
Company Size: Enterprise
Region: Canada
Website: www.nationwideappraisals.com

Introduction

The Nationwide Group is Canada’s largest real estate appraisal company, providing valuation services and proptech solutions to leading financial institutions across the country. As they began shifting from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, they faced mounting AWS costs, visibility challenges, and difficulty modernizing legacy systems.

Borealis Solutions partnered with them to solve these challenges—with speed, clarity, and sustainable outcomes.

The Challenge

After years of struggling to fully migrate to AWS, The Nationwide Group’s infrastructure team faced growing risks and inefficiencies:

  • Prolonged data center outages were threatening uptime and business continuity

  • AWS bills were rising with no visibility into what was driving usage

  • No tagging or governance framework was in place across cloud resources

  • A legacy Java application proved difficult to deploy or scale in the cloud

They needed both immediate cost relief and a long-term modernization roadmap.

Why The Nationwide Group Chose Borealis

They chose Borealis Solutions because of our:

  • Deep experience in cloud cost governance and sustainability practices

  • Proven success in modernizing legacy Java workloads for the cloud

  • Ability to deliver quick wins while laying a foundation for scale

  • Emphasis on visibility, accountability, and business-aligned cloud strategies

Our Approach

We delivered a high-impact engagement that balanced speed and strategy:

1. Tagging & Cost Visibility

  • Rolled out a structured tagging strategy across AWS accounts

  • Enabled detailed cost breakdowns by team, environment, and application

  • Made AWS usage fully visible and traceable for the first time

2. Cost Optimization

  • Analyzed resource utilization and eliminated idle infrastructure

  • Rightsized compute instances to align with actual demand

  • Cut monthly AWS spend by 49%—from $37,000 to $19,000

3. Legacy Application Modernization

  • Containerized the Java-based legacy application using Docker

  • Migrated the app to a scalable, resilient AWS environment

  • Prepared the stack for future enhancements using cloud-native services

4. Governance & Sustainability

  • Established governance frameworks for tagging, rightsizing, and reviews

  • Ensured workloads followed AWS best practices for resilience and environmental sustainability

The Results

The Nationwide Group unlocked measurable and lasting improvements:

  • ✅ 49% AWS cost savings, freeing up budget for innovation

  • ✅ Legacy app modernized and containerized, ready for scale

  • ✅ Complete visibility into cloud usage, down to the workload level

  • ✅ Stronger governance and resilience, reducing operational risk

  • ✅ Cloud confidence regained, with a path forward defined

“Borealis Solutions brought clarity and control to our AWS usage. Not only did they cut our bill by almost half, but they set us up with a strategy to sustainably modernize our infrastructure. Their expertise and speed made the difference.”
— Executive Leadership, The Nationwide Group

What’s Next

With the foundations in place, the Nationwide Group is moving forward with:

  • Ongoing optimization of their containerized environments

  • Migrating more legacy workloads to cloud-native architectures

  • Deploying real-time dashboards and AI-based governance automation

Brendon Palmer
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