Blowing Your Budget in Azure? How to Master Your Public Cloud Investment

Let’s set the scene. It’s 2022 and everyone’s moving to Azure. You don’t want to get left behind and you’re pretty impressed with Azure’s features and ease of use from the research you’ve done. You’ve been told public cloud costs are lean, optimised, and that you’ll only pay for what they use. 

You make the move and the first month’s bill comes through – you’re 200% over budget with unknown costs, oversized databases and underutilised virtual machines. You don’t know how to optimize, what to do, and you’re due to present your budget to the CFO at 4pm… 

Does this sound eerily like your experience? 

Let’s be honest; Azure isn’t cheap if you don’t have a team of experts optimising everything 24×7. 

This article will cover how to master your investment to get the most out of public cloud. We’ll go over: 

• How to accurately scope your project and capture hidden costs when you’re at day 0 so you’re not surprised. 

• How to monitor and control Azure spend once you’ve deployed. 

• How to right-size, such as under utilised machines and storage. 

• Long term cost management strategies and commitment incentives. 

• The benefits you can reap from a CSP relationship and managed services. 

Why Most Azure Setups Bleed Cash 

Azure’s strengths are flexibility and accessibility, but both come with risk if you aren’t careful. 

Developers deploy, scale, test, forget. Resources idle, prices balloon, and suddenly the invoice is triple what finance expected. 

Here’s what we see in the market all the time: 

• VMs ticking over with no inbound traffic 

• Orphaned virtual machine disks after a half-done decommission 

• Test/dev environments left running on weekends when nobody’s using them 

• Massive supercomputer-level databases sized up after a one-off sale that you forgot to downsize 

• 10-year-old archived backups sitting on Premium SSD storage 

• Contractors spinning up resources and never removing them 

Does this sound familiar? 

If you want to master your Azure investment, you need transparency, tools, and someone holding you accountable. This is where Azure managed services pay for themselves, however not all managed services are born equal; look for a provider that focuses on cost optimisation and guardrails, not just delivery services. 

Scoping Your Project 

Measure twice and cut once – the first step of mastering your Azure investment is scoping the right resources. Even the ones Microsoft don’t tell you about. 

Here are some fool-proof ways of starting off on the right foot: 

• Size your resources correctly – just because your database has 32 cores on-premises doesn’t mean it needs it! When migrating, put your workload’s utilisation statistics under the microscope and understand how much power they actually need – after all, you can always scale up in Azure at any time! 

• Understand how your solution fits together – understanding how each component your solution interacts with other resources in Azure is key to avoiding unexpected costs. Did you know that GRS storage requires expensive inter-regional bandwidth? Or that alert rules cost money? Or that downloading a file from blob storage is charged? The list goes on. 

• Explore your options – sometimes the cheapest option isn’t just the most basic SKU. Did you know that in some cases cool tier storage is more expensive than hot tier? Do some research on what options are available to solve your problem and spend the time to play around in the pricing calculator. The results might surprise you! 

Overwhelmed already? An experienced managed Azure services that can confidently lead you through the minefield will save you time, budget, and brainpower for actually transforming your business. 

Monitor and Control Your Azure Spend 

So you’ve got your solution designed and quoted. You go ahead and deploy. 

How do you make sure the ship isn’t drifting off course into a cost-berg? 

Azure Cost Management + Billing 

This is the 101 class for keeping tabs on costs. Out of the box, Azure Cost Management lets you: 

• Break down costs by resource, resource group, day, etc. 

• Set budgets and get alerts before you overspend 

• Track daily spend for instant feedback 

• Export cost data for review and comparison 

A great start but getting your monthly or even daily cost isn’t very helpful if your costs keep changing and you can’t work out why. How do we start identifying where cost changes are coming from? 

Tagging 

Tagging lets you assign metadata (like “Project – New Webfront”, “Department – Sales”, or “Owner – Mike”) so you can see exactly who and what is consuming your budget. 

A good partner will work with you on the initial design to implement tagging from day one. Retrofitting tagging gets messy (and expensive), and what if you add more resources later? How do you keep resources tagged so your reports don’t drift out of sync? 

Automation 

The real secret behind cost saving. 

Reactively, automation gives you the power to enforce tagging across your environment without manual overhead, allowing full visibility of the cost centers within. By leveraging automation, you can automatically audit, apply, and remediate tags at scale. It’s a low-maintenance way to stay in control and eliminate human error in enforcing cloud governance policies. 

Proactively, automation is used to leverage Azure’s scalability and pay-as-you-go model to your benefit. Only use that virtual machine during work hours? Turn it off at 6pm and back on at 8am. Only run reports at lunchtime? Automate scaling down your database at 3pm and scale it back up at 11am. Don’t want to continuously nudge the needle on your file share capacity? Automate scaling to keep 5% headroom. 

Remember, you don’t have to go it alone – it’s often more cost effective to partner with a managed services provider that has done all the leg work for you, allowing you to benefit from years of incremental, tried and tested automation. 

External Tools 

Azure’s out of the box tools only go so far. Once you’ve got the basics above in place, leveraging external tools built for cost observability and reportability has you at the top of the staircase. 

If you have the time to engage with and run demos of platforms, look for features like granular drilldowns, multi-cloud visibility, predictive analytics, customizable dashboards, and enhanced alerting. They provide you with the power to dive deeply and make smarter decisions in the new financial paradigm. 

If you don’t have the time, look for a managed services provide that bundles cost management platforms in with their service. These are often built off years of learnings and customer feedback, and let you get straight to features that you’ll actually use rather than pretty pie charts that look good in a demo. 

Macquarie Lens unlocks hidden savings, benchmarks against best practice, and reviews compliance/security posture (and yes, it’s free for a limited time) based on our own experiences. 

Right-Size Your Resources 

This is where real savings hide. 

1. Identify idle VMs: Use Azure Advisor and Cost Management reports. Look for <5% CPU, low memory use, or no network traffic over 30+ days. 

2. Review Storage Accounts: Archive or delete blob storage that hasn’t been accessed in months. Down-tier storage you don’t read or write to often. 

3. Right-size VMs: Are your workloads living on huge instances but barely breaking a sweat? Automate your scaling or downsize. 

4. Remove orphaned resources: Disks, public IPs, and network interfaces without an associated VM are easy to miss and hard to find. 

5. Turn off test/dev after hours: Use automation to shut down what doesn’t need to run overnight or on weekends. 

Managed service providers automate this housekeeping. Set it and forget it. 

Long Term Cost Strategies 

Not all optimisation strategies are equal. Here’s what works based on our experience: 

• Commit to Reserved Instances (RI): Pay up-front for 1 or 3 years for stable, predictable workloads, and save up to 72% compared to pay-as-you-go. 

• Leverage Azure Hybrid Benefit: Bring existing Windows Server or SQL Server licences to Azure for up to 85% savings on licensing costs. 

• Move to PaaS: Lift-and-shift gets you to Azure, but Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) unlocks auto-scaling, managed backups and less infrastructure to maintain (and pay for). 

• Review regularly: Monthly cost reviews are critical. Patterns change, and yesterday’s optimised setup can be today’s waste. 

• Invest in Anomaly Detection: Costs move daily in Azure and you need a way to jump on them today, not at the end of the month. 

• Leverage the Bleeding Edge: Did you know, Azure is extending to the edge? Currently a CSP-only feature allowing for even more discounts for stable workloads. 

• Engage a Managed Service Partner: They combine all the above into a repeatable, accountable process – and deliver insights you’ll never get from a once-off audit. 

Reserved Instances in Azure 

This is NOT the “set and forget” deal you’d expect. Reserved Instances (RI) are powerful, but you need to use them wisely. 

• Best for: Predictable, steady-state workloads (not dev/test or highly variable environments) 

• Key Benefits: Up to 72% savings, easier cost forecasting 

• Gotchas: If you don’t use what you reserved, you’re still paying. A managed provider can help you right-size and adjust as your business needs change. 

Azure Hybrid Benefit Explained 

If your business has existing Microsoft licences (Windows Server, SQL Server) with Software Assurance, you’re probably leaving money on the table. 

Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you “bring” those licences to Azure VMs or PaaS. Instead of paying twice for licensing, you get discounts up to 85%. Yes, eighty-five percent. 

Combine this with Reserved Instances and you’re stacking the savings. 

Leveraging CSP Benefits 

Cloud Solutions Providers (CSPs) enjoy discounts from Microsoft across a range of services, including everyone’s favourite topic – Microsoft Licensing. 

Engaging with a managed service provider that is a recognised CSP is the best way to eek out even more benefits where you may not have thought possible like cheaper licensing, and access to Azure Premier Support. 

The Most Common Azure Cost Pitfalls (And How to Dodge Them) 

If you’ve made it this far, here’s a recap what NOT to do: 

• No tagging or inconsistent tagging: If you can’t track it, you can’t manage it. 

• Orphaned/forgotten resources: These are cost magnets. Run regular audits. 

• Leaving test/dev on 24/7: Easy to automate shutdowns. No excuses. 

• No budget alerts: Set them. Review them. Act on them. 

• Not reviewing Reserved Instance usage: Your workloads change. Adjust reservations to match. 

• Assuming ‘Pay as you go’ is always cheaper: For long-lived workloads, it’s usually not. 

Managed Azure Services Make Cost Optimisation Stick 

Here’s what LifeHealthCare found after moving to a Managed Azure partnership with Macquarie Cloud Services: 

“The assessment showed us real areas of optimisation, like not needing to bring across our Citrix legacy servers, reducing our footprint massively. It became a no-brainer for us.”  

– Matt Slade-Smith, Group IT Manager, LifeHealthCare 

By leveraging managed services: 

• Their environment was assessed and migrated with cost-efficiency baked in 

• Unused legacy infrastructure was scrapped, test/dev environments put on a leash 

• They gained monthly optimisation reviews, right-sizing and recommendations for Reserved Instances and Hybrid Benefit 

And crucially, they spend less, with greater confidence. 

A managed service partner brings: 

• 24/7 monitoring and ticket response (Macquarie’s is 15 minutes, not hours) 

• Dedicated Azure experts proactively reviewing accounts 

• Ongoing reporting, compliance checks, and best practice governance 

• Automated clean-ups, continuous optimisation, and local support 

More transparency, less drama, better bottom line. 

Take Back Control of Your Azure Costs 

Don’t just “hope for the best” with Azure spending. Real savings come from a proactive approach, using the tools at your disposal and (if we’re honest) letting someone else sweat the details. 

Want to see how much you could save?  

Explore our Managed Services for expert guidance, tailored solutions, and maximum efficiency.  

Go on, your budget will thank you.