Why this exists

The 20% of waste that drives 80% of the bill.

Azure bills rarely creep up because of the headline workloads. They creep up because of forgotten test environments, oversized VMs running at 5% CPU, premium storage on cold data, and missing reservations on steady-state compute. A focused sweep typically finds enough quick wins to pay for the engagement many times over — and surfaces the bigger structural issues worth a deeper look.

What's included

Where the easy money lives.

01

Spend breakdown

Where the money actually goes — by service, subscription, environment, and workload. Anomalies and unexpected line items flagged.

02

Right-sizing

VMs, App Service plans, AKS pools, SQL tiers — sized against actual utilisation, not the original guess. Concrete recommendations with risk noted.

03

Reservations & savings plans

Reserved instance and savings plan analysis for steady-state compute. ROI and break-even calculated, term length recommended.

04

Idle & orphaned resources

Unattached disks, unused public IPs, dead NSGs, abandoned test environments, dev resources running 24/7. Listed and quantified.

05

Storage tiering

Hot/cool/archive analysis for blob storage, premium-vs-standard for managed disks, lifecycle policy recommendations.

06

Performance hotspots

Where performance issues are costing you money (over-scaled to compensate, retries from a slow dependency). Tuning recommendations included.

Deliverables

What you get at the end.

Timeline

Three phases. Three to five days.

01
Day 1

Access & scope

Cost Management Reader access provisioned. Scope confirmed across subscriptions and workloads.

02
Days 2–4

Investigate

Cost analytics, utilisation pulls, performance review. Quick wins prioritised; deeper structural issues flagged.

03
Day 5

Report & walkthrough

Report delivered, walkthrough session, action plan agreed.

FAQ

Common questions.

How is this different from FinOps Review?

This is a tactical sweep — quick wins, individual resources, ranked actions. The FinOps Review is structural — governance, budgeting, allocation, and process. Many teams do this engagement first to capture immediate savings, then FinOps Review when they want a sustainable practice.

Do you implement the changes?

By default, no — the engagement ends with the plan. We can implement under Ongoing Platform Support or as a follow-on engagement if you want hands-on help.

What kind of savings should we expect?

It varies. We've seen anything from 10% to 40% on identified line items. We won't promise a number before we look — but we'll be honest if the savings won't pay back the engagement, and tell you that on the discovery call.

Will you push us into reservations we don't need?

No. Reservations only make sense for steady-state workloads. If your usage is bursty or about to change, we'll say so and recommend savings plans or no commitment.

What about non-compute waste?

Storage, networking egress, log ingestion, and database SKUs all get the same treatment. The headline saving is usually compute, but the long-tail items often add up.

Next step

Stop overpaying for resources you barely use.

Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll talk through your spend pattern and confirm whether this is the right engagement before any commitment.

Related engagements

What teams often book next.