Azure, AWS and hybrid estates run as one environment: provisioning, identity, backup, monitoring and the monthly cost line that comes with them.
Right-sizing and reserved capacity are reviewed quarterly rather than at renewal, because that is when the money is still recoverable.
Run as one estate rather than as separate consoles with separate teams.
Right-sizing, reservations and orphaned resources, with savings reported in currency.
Tagging, budgets, policy and identity before workloads land, not retrofitted later.
Cloud does not remove operations. It changes which console the incident appears in.
Most cloud problems are not technical. They are the absence of tagging, budgets, ownership and a review cadence, which is why the bill grows faster than the workload.
Subscription and account structure, network topology, identity, tagging taxonomy, budgets and policy guardrails.
Cost controls go in before workloads. Retrofitting tagging across a live estate is a project nobody funds willingly.
An estate someone can still explain in two years.
Assessment, lift and shift where it pays, re-platform where it pays more, and a decommissioning plan for what is left behind.
The decommissioning half is where the savings actually are, and it is the half most migrations never finish.
Old capacity switched off, not just new capacity switched on.
Resource health, quotas, subscription events, autoscale behaviour, patching of cloud-hosted systems and incident response.
Alerts include cost signals, because an unnoticed scale-out is a billing incident as well as a technical one.
One bridge covering cloud and on-premises together.
Showback by tag and team, anomaly detection, right-sizing recommendations, reservation and savings plan modelling, orphaned resource cleanup.
Recommendations are quantified in currency and tracked to completion, not delivered as a dashboard and forgotten.
Savings reported as money, with the change that produced them.
Backup policy for cloud workloads, cross-region copies where justified, restore testing, and documented recovery runbooks.
Cloud durability is not a backup strategy. Deleted is still deleted, and a misconfiguration replicates.
A tested recovery path, not an assumption about the provider.
Single sign-on, conditional access, privileged access controls, service principal hygiene and access reviews that produce evidence.
Long-lived keys and stale service principals are the exposure that grows quietly in every cloud estate.
Access that is reviewable and provably reviewed.
How a cloud engagement runs
Delivered as a managed service, with migrations and platform builds quoted separately so a project month never lands on the run invoice.
| Area | Scope | Cadence | Evidence produced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platform | Subscriptions, accounts, networking, policy, tagging | Continuous | Compliance position against your own policy set |
| Workloads | Compute, containers, managed services, patching | Continuous, patched monthly | Patch record and resource health report |
| Cost | Showback, anomalies, right-sizing, commitments | Monthly, reviewed quarterly | Savings realised in currency, with the change named |
| Backup | Policy, cross-region copies, restore testing | Daily verification, scheduled test | Timed restore evidence per tier |
| Identity | SSO, conditional access, privileged access, keys | Quarterly review | Access review evidence and remediation list |
| Resilience | Recovery runbooks, failover exercises | Scheduled exercise | Exercise report with measured recovery time |
Estates do not overspend because engineers choose expensive services. They overspend because nothing carries a tag, nobody owns a budget line, and no one has authority to switch off a resource whose creator has left.
So the first work is boring: tagging, ownership, budgets and a review that produces decisions. The technical optimisations are real and they come second, because until spend is attributable nobody will approve turning anything off.
Ask for a cost assessmentIndicative approach. Savings are quantified from your own billing data during assessment.
No, and any provider saying otherwise is selling. Steady-state workloads with predictable load and paid-for hardware are frequently cheaper where they are. The assessment prices both, including the workloads that should move back, which is a conversation more estates need than admit.
Unknown until we see your billing data, and any percentage quoted before that is invented. What is predictable is where the waste sits: oversized instances, non-production running overnight, unattached storage, and commitments that do not match usage. Those four cover most of it in most estates.
Not to start. Native cost tooling plus disciplined tagging gets most of the way, and a third-party platform earns its licence once the estate is large enough or spans several providers. Buying the tool before fixing tagging produces expensive dashboards over unattributable data.
You do. The subscriptions, accounts, tenancy and commercial relationship with the provider stay in your name, and we operate inside them. We will not put your estate under our tenancy, because that makes leaving us expensive and that is not a lever we want.
Routinely. The usual split is that we hold the platform, monitoring and cost cadence while your team holds the application layer, with a documented boundary and one shared queue. What does not work is split ownership of the same incident without a handover point.
Start with a cost assessment against your own billing data. It is short, it quantifies the waste in currency, and the report is yours to act on.