Ask most finance leaders about their Azure bill and you tend to get the same answer. It went up. Nobody flagged it. And no one quite owns the number. The cloud was supposed to make cost predictable. For a lot of organisations it has done the opposite.
The reason is rarely the cloud itself. It is governance. Estates grow organically, without a Landing Zone and without policy guardrails, and cost creeps because nothing stops it. The result is consistent: the average organisation wastes close to a third of its cloud spend on resources it does not need, either over-provisioned or simply idle.
Two things are bringing this to a head. VMware and Broadcom renewals are landing at multiples of last year, which is pushing organisations to rethink where their workloads run. And SQL Server 2016 is now out of support, so estates carrying legacy workloads face a migration decision whether they wanted one or not. At the same time, regulated firms have DORA resilience obligations that an ungoverned environment cannot evidence.
Reporting waste is not the same as removing it
Plenty of tools will show you a dashboard of your cloud waste. Far fewer will actually act on it. That is the difference between cloud cost reporting and a real FinOps discipline. A dashboard nobody reads changes nothing. Rightsizing, reservations and anomaly alerting that are actioned month after month are what recover the money and keep it recovered.
What good looks like is simple to describe and hard to sustain alone: a cloud estate where every pound is explainable, waste is removed and kept out, resilience is tested rather than assumed, and one team owns the number. That is what an ongoing managed service is for. The assessment shows you the gap, the service closes it and holds it closed.
The migration question nobody asked for
For many organisations the trigger is not ambition, it is a renewal letter. VMware and Broadcom pricing has changed the economics of staying put, and IBM Power estates carry their own end-of-life pressure. The better move is to treat migration as the front end of a managed estate: migrate into governed Landing Zones with the guardrails already in place, so you do not simply move the sprawl and the waste from one platform to another. Through our Skytap and Azure partnerships we can bridge IBM Power workloads that most providers cannot touch, and run the estate afterwards rather than handing it back.
Introducing Azure Cloud Management
This is why we have launched our new Azure Cloud Management service. It takes back control of both the cost and the risk in your Azure estate, and it is built around a FinOps programme that actions savings rather than just charting them. In practice that means:
- A FinOps programme that opens by telling you, in pounds, what you are wasting, then recovers it through rightsizing, reservations and anomaly alerting.
- Governed Landing Zones and policy guardrails, with Defender for Cloud posture management, so the waste and the risk do not creep back.
- Managed backup, Azure Site Recovery and tested disaster recovery, for genuine resilience and DORA evidence.
- A migration bridge from IBM Power or VMware into a properly governed Azure estate, run by one accountable team.
Proven before you commit
As with everything we do, we prove it first. Every engagement starts with a free Azure Environment Assessment. Give us your environment and we will show you, in pounds, what you are wasting and what we can recover, before you commit to anything.
The model is backed by real outcomes. Ocorian rationalised its SQL Server estate with Northdoor and cut associated costs by around 20%. Blue Cube Travel moved from on-premises to Azure with reduced risk and work-anywhere confidence, published as a Microsoft customer story. Independent for 37 years, senior-led, and accountable to you rather than to an acquirer.
Find out what you are wasting
If no one can fully explain your monthly Azure number, that is the signal. Book your free Azure Environment Assessment and we will put a real figure on the waste, and a plan to recover it.