Cloud cost optimisation — 35% reduction without downtime
E-commerce operations, 30 staff · E-commerce
Azure bill had doubled in 12 months with no clear owner. Over-provisioned VMs, orphaned resources, and no tagging strategy — leadership wanted savings without risking production stability.
The problem
Cloud spend was growing faster than revenue. Nobody knew which workloads drove cost. Previous 'optimisation' was just turning things off until something broke.
Constraints
- — Production workloads — no downtime tolerance
- — Small internal IT team — changes must be documented
- — Need ongoing governance, not a one-off cleanup
Approach
Step 1
Cost audit
Full Azure consumption analysis — resource inventory, sizing review, reserved instance opportunities, orphaned assets, and tagging gaps.
Step 2
Right-sizing
Rightsized VMs based on 30-day utilisation data. Removed unused disks, IPs, and test environments. Implemented auto-shutdown for non-prod.
Step 3
Governance
Tagging policy, monthly cost review cadence, alerts for spend anomalies, and runbook for ongoing optimisation.
Deliverables
- Cost audit report with prioritised actions
- Rightsizing implemented across production
- Tagging and budget alerts configured
- Monthly review template for internal team
Results
- Cost reduction
- ~35% monthly Azure spend reduction
- Downtime
- Zero production impact during changes
- Visibility
- Cost per workload — tagged and reportable
- Ongoing
- Quarterly review retainer established
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