Caterpillar case study

Explore how Caterpillar leveraged Cloudaware for FinOps success and cloud governance at scale

1. About Caterpillar

With operations in more than 190 countries, Caterpillar relies on a large multi-cloud footprint to support digital services, internal systems, and global IT operations.

2. Challenges

With three public clouds plus on-prem sources in the mix, basic operating tasks started to take longer than they should have:

Inventory was fragmented. Asset views differed across AWS, Azure, and GCP, which left gaps and slowed down decisions.
Compliance was harder to keep consistent. PCI DSS and internal standards needed continuous enforcement across environments, not periodic checks.
Inconsistent tagging and misaligned cost reports. Allocation depended on tags that were incomplete or inconsistent, and reports that did not line up across clouds.
Monitoring signals lacked asset context. New Relic alerts required manual correlation to figure out what asset was affected and who owned it.
Incident routing was inconsistent. PagerDuty and internal systems did not share the same inventory context, so handoffs took longer.
SCCM data stayed separate from cloud configuration. On-prem inventory and cloud resources lived in different places, leaving the hybrid picture incomplete.

3. Solutions

Caterpillar brought inventory, policy checks, and cost reporting into one operating view, then used that same context to tighten monitoring and incident response.

Unified inventory across cloud and on-prem

Caterpillar used CMDB as the source of truth for assets across AWS, Azure, and GCP, and pulled in on-prem inventory through SCCM integration. That removed the need to reconcile separate lists when teams needed to answer basic questions about scope and ownership.

coca cola cmdb

Cost visibility that supports allocation and savings work

With FinOps, the team could break down spend across accounts and environments, spot underutilized resources, and track tagging gaps that affected allocation. FinOps reporting became less of a monthly rebuild because the same resource context stayed consistent across clouds.

Continuous policy enforcement across environments

Caterpillar relied on IT compliance to run built-in controls and custom policies aligned to internal standards. Compliance moved from periodic checks to continuous enforcement, and audit evidence was easier to assemble from the same system.

Enriched triage with asset context

With New Relic integration, alerts were connected back to CMDB records, so triage started with the affected asset and its environment context rather than manual lookups.

More consistent incident routing

With PagerDuty integration, incidents carried CMDB context into the workflow, which reduced misroutes and shortened the time spent bouncing tickets between teams.

4. Implementation

Cloudaware was rolled out at Caterpillar over 90 days. The focus was to connect inventory sources first, then turn that data into dashboards, policies, and workflows teams could run month over month.

Deployed CMDB collectors through cross-cloud API connections and SCCM integration to ingest on-prem asset data.
Built centralized dashboards so teams could check AWS, Azure, and GCP in one place instead of jumping between consoles.
Put tagging policies and cost allocation reports in FinOps on a repeatable track, so chargeback and monthly reviews stopped depending on manual clean-up.
Set up policy checks in IT compliance, including Caterpillar-specific controls that matched the internal audit framework.
Enabled integrations to correlate alerts with inventory context and improve incident routing.
Normalized SCCM records and mapped them into CMDB to complete the hybrid infrastructure view.
Onboarded teams and set a steady cadence for compliance checks and FinOps reporting.

5. Results

Within the first three months, Caterpillar reported improved audit readiness and 100% visibility across cloud and on-prem assets, with complete inventory coverage across AWS, Azure, GCP, and SCCM-managed environments.

42% fewer compliance violations via continuous monitoring and policy automation.
$627,000 in annual cloud savings from rightsizing and waste reduction.
34% faster incident resolution with integrated alerting and New Relic + PagerDuty context.

6. Testimonial

“Before Cloudaware, we didn’t have a clean, consistent view across our cloud providers. Now we can enforce the policies that matter and stay on top of cloud costs without stitching together data from different tools. The New Relic, PagerDuty, and SCCM integrations fit into our existing workflows, so rollout was smooth and the value showed up quickly.”

Sarah Mitchell, Cloud Operations Manager, Caterpillar Inc.

7. Conclusion

Caterpillar’s results came from consolidating asset visibility, enforcing policies continuously, and tying incident response back to the same inventory and ownership context. Cloudaware helped the team reduce waste, tighten compliance, and run governance workflows that scale across a complex multi-cloud and hybrid environment.

Ready to control your multi-cloud budget with the same level of clarity? Schedule a demo to identify savings opportunities across AWS, Azure, and GCP.