Our Top 3 Recommendations for Reducing Costs in Azure
As the financial year draws to a close, unused budgets could slip away - along with opportunities to optimise costs. Did you know that a third of cloud spending is wasted? At Shaping Cloud, we leverage our decade-long expertise and Azure certified specialists to help you drastically cut down on unnecessary spend with proven strategies. These are the top three strategies we’ve seen make a real difference:
Rightsizing Instances
Many organisations continue to over-provision resources during cloud migration, mistakenly equating unused capacity with potential performance gains. However, Azure provides detailed performance and utilisation data that can guide you to more accurate sizing. Regular assessments of your resource usage can reveal opportunities to downsize or upscale effectively, ensuring you pay only for what you need. By rightsizing your instances, you not only cut costs but also enhance your system's efficiency.
Pro Tip: Use Azure Monitor to track performance metrics over time and identify underutilised resources that can be resized or shut down.
Using Reserved Instances and Savings Plans
Committing to reserved instances or savings plans can be one of your biggest cost savers. If you have stable and predictable workloads, locking in a three-year reserved instance pricing can save you up to 72% compared to pay-as-you-go rates. It's all about knowing your long-term needs—just ask yourself if your resources will be in use for the next 18 months. If yes, then a reserved plan should be your go-to option to capitalise on these massive savings.
Pro Tip: Review your workload patterns annually to ensure your reserved instances align with your actual usage, avoiding both under and overcommitment.
Optimising Storage Solutions
Whilst storage is cheap per GB in Azure, data growth is ever-increasing, so we find this is often an area where organisations are paying far more than is necessary. Certainly, strategically managing your data storage can lead to significant savings by using lifecycle policies to tier and remove data. However, considering third-party solutions can be a much faster and easier to implement way to further reduce costs without compromising on performance.
Pro Tip: Integrate third-party storage solutions like NetApp Files to enhance data management. NetApp Files can reduce storage costs by up to 50% while boosting performance, making it suitable for enterprises needing robust, scalable storage solutions.
Adopting these three simple strategies – rightsizing, leveraging reserved pricing, and optimising storage – will not only cut your costs but also enhance operational efficiency. Most importantly, every day that they are not implemented will be costing you money without delivering value to your organisation. If you’d like some help optimising your Microsoft cloud services – whether Azure or M365 – contact us today for a free personalised consultation. If you’re already one of our managed services customers, you can sleep easy – cost optimisation is included within your service, so you’ll already be benefiting from the savings we’ve made on your behalf as I’m sure you notice in your reducing CSP bills.
Every hour could be more money wasted until you’ve optimised Azure.
Want to find out more? Contact us today to learn how Shaping Cloud can help you see what’s costing you the most and where you can save money today.
Helen Gerling
CEO
Shaping Cloud
hello@shapingcloud.com