Most organisations assume their Azure costs are broadly reasonable. The bills go up gradually, nobody asks too many questions, and the monthly totals become normalised. Then someone actually looks.
We ran a focused cost audit on a mid-sized Azure environment — roughly 40 VMs with supporting storage, networking, and security services. It took one afternoon. The findings added up to over £4,000 per month in identifiable waste.
Here is where the money was hiding.
Storage: Paying for Capacity Nobody Uses
Cloud storage services often bill on provisioned capacity, not what you actually use. A share provisioned at 2TB costs the same whether it holds 50GB or 1.8TB.
In this environment, we found multiple storage shares provisioned at premium tiers but running at single-digit percentage utilisation. One had already been moved to a lower tier as a test — saving roughly £300 per month with no noticeable impact on performance.
The pattern repeats across most Azure estates: storage gets provisioned generously at deployment, and nobody revisits it.
DR Replication: Protecting VMs That No Longer Matter
Disaster recovery replication was protecting approximately 40 VMs. At roughly £50 per VM per month including replica disk costs and licensing, this was running at an estimated £2,000 per month.
The question nobody had asked recently: do all 40 VMs still need DR?
Some were dev and test machines added "just in case" and never removed. Others were legacy workloads that had been superseded, but the replication — and its associated replica disks — persisted. The VM was gone. The DR bill was not.
Backup Vaults: 10% of Total Spend
Backup costs were running at roughly 10% of the total Azure bill. The industry benchmark is 2–5%. Double the upper benchmark is a strong signal that retention policies need reviewing.
The most common pattern: default retention left at initial settings — often 30 or 90 days — when the actual business requirement is 7 or 14 days for non-production environments. Nobody goes back to tighten retention because backups are a "set and forget" service that nobody wants to touch.
We also found backup vaults protecting resources that no longer existed, and redundancy levels set higher than the data warranted.
Security Tooling: Double Billing and Wrong Pricing Model
Several VMs had overlapping security plans enabled simultaneously — the higher tier already includes everything in the lower tier, so enabling both just bills you twice for the same protection.
Separately, dozens of storage accounts were using a per-transaction pricing model that costs significantly more than the flat-rate alternative for anything above minimal usage. The break-even point is lower than most people expect.
Why This Matters
These are not obscure optimisations. They are straightforward checks that go unaddressed because nobody is assigned to look. The bills get paid. The waste accumulates.
The total time was about four hours. The return: over £1,000 per hour of audit time — and the savings are recurring.
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