Azure Cost Savings Case Study

Cloud bills have a habit of creeping up quietly until finance asks an uncomfortable question. Our case study follows a data analytics business whose Azure spend had grown faster than its headcount, and how a structured cost optimisation engagement brought it back under control.

We will explore where the waste was hiding, the rightsizing and licensing changes Cloudworks made, and the ongoing governance that kept the savings in place month after month.

The names of the business and people have been changed but this was a real engagement - we are able to have a call with this client if you would like a reference before any potential Azure cost optimisation work.

Overview

Organisation

Kestrel Analytics, a data analytics company running customer-facing dashboards and reporting workloads entirely on Microsoft Azure.

Challenge

Kestrel Analytics' Azure bill had risen by over 40% year on year, well ahead of the growth in their customer base. Virtual machines had been sized generously "to be safe" and never revisited, dev and test environments were left running around the clock, and nobody owned cost as a metric. Finance flagged the trend and asked for an explanation the technical team couldn't fully give.

Solution

Cloudworks ran a structured Azure cost optimisation engagement: a full spend audit using Azure Cost Management and Advisor, followed by rightsizing, licensing review, and automated scheduling, with cost governance built in so the savings would stick.

Rather than a one-off cleanup, the engagement was designed to give Kestrel Analytics' team ownership of cost going forward, with dashboards and budget alerts they could monitor themselves.

Objective

The primary objectives were to:

Identify and eliminate wasted Azure spend without affecting performance.
Right-size compute resources to match real-world utilisation.
Take advantage of reserved instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit licensing.
Give the internal team ongoing visibility and ownership of cloud costs.

Optimisation Process

Step 1: Spend Audit

Using Azure Cost Management, Azure Advisor and resource-level tagging, Cloudworks built a full picture of where Kestrel Analytics' money was going: which subscriptions, resource groups and workloads were driving spend, and how utilisation compared to provisioned capacity.

Key findings included:

Production VMs averaging under 20% CPU utilisation across the month.
Dev and test environments running 24/7 despite only being used during office hours.
Premium-tier storage attached to workloads that didn't need the performance.

Step 2: Rightsizing

Working through each workload individually, Cloudworks resized virtual machines to match observed demand, moved eligible storage to lower-cost tiers, and consolidated underused resources, with monitoring in place to confirm performance was unaffected.

Step 3: Scheduling Non-Production Environments

Automated start/stop schedules were applied to development and test environments, so they only ran during working hours instead of continuously.

Step 4: Reservations and Licensing

For workloads with predictable, long-term usage, Cloudworks purchased one and three-year Azure Reserved Instances, and applied Azure Hybrid Benefit against Kestrel Analytics' existing Windows Server and SQL Server licensing to reduce compute costs further.

Step 5: Cost Governance

To keep spend under control going forward, Cloudworks set up budget alerts, resource tagging standards, and a monthly cost review dashboard the finance team could read without needing to understand Azure itself.

Results

The cost optimisation engagement delivered measurable and lasting savings for Kestrel Analytics:

1. 34% Reduction in Monthly Azure Spend: Rightsizing, scheduling and reservations combined to cut Kestrel Analytics' monthly Azure bill by over a third.
2. No Impact on Performance: Customer-facing dashboards saw no degradation in response times following rightsizing, confirmed through post-change monitoring.
3. Non-Production Costs Cut by Two Thirds: Scheduling dev and test environments to run only during office hours removed the majority of their runtime cost.
4. Ongoing Cost Ownership: Finance now has a monthly dashboard and budget alerts, replacing the surprise at renewal with visibility throughout the month.
5. Reinvested Savings: The freed-up budget was redirected into a new analytics feature the product team had previously put on hold.

Testimonial

"We knew we were probably overspending on Azure but had no idea where to start looking. Cloudworks found savings we wouldn't have found ourselves, and more importantly, gave us the tools to keep costs under control going forward."

– Michael Ashby, CTO, Kestrel Analytics

Why Choose Cloudworks for Azure Cost Optimisation?

Cutting cloud costs isn't just a one-off exercise — it needs to stay under control month after month. Our Azure cost optimisation service combines a thorough technical audit with the governance and reporting that keeps savings in place long after we've finished.

If your Azure bill has been climbing without a clear explanation, contact our team today for a free cost review.