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Azure
Posted 7th May 2025
11 min read
Lack of continuous oversight and optimisation of your Microsoft Azure environment can cause unnecessary cloud waste, increasing costs and reducing efficiency. Learn more on cloud waste, how it occurs and how to prevent it.
In this article we cover:
Cloud waste refers to unused, underused, or unnecessary cloud resources that still generate costs. Right now, within your Azure Cloud environment, you could be paying for cloud computing power, storage, or services that you’re not using effectively.
As the MSP and Tech Partner industries are now demonstrating, there is an epidemic of widespread cloud waste in the UK. A staggering 78% of companies surveyed suggested that up to 50% of their overall cloud expenditure is wasted each year, with an average of 32% being the standard.
Cloud Waste is a significant contributor to the overall problem of data waste and mismanagement that amounts to an estimated annual cost of £3.7 billion of annual revenue for the private sector. And the information available for the UK public sector is just as sobering, with figures detailing how it could save £90 million simply by optimising their Microsoft Azure cost strategy across their data storage.
The Home Office themselves were recently subject to a cloud restructuring project that cut their cloud costs by 40% through effectively managing their autoscaling, rightsizing and employing much stricter management methods for data housekeeping and deletion.
There can be no doubting the transformative and liberating power that cloud computing holds for the organisations that use it. It gives businesses and their users access to levels of information management, data control and bespoke business applications that would be massively cost prohibitive and unmanageable using on-site hardware and tech.
Even though, as the figures show, the consequences of cloud waste is clearly a financial issue, it can be viewed as the symptom of a much wider and underlying problem. Getting your cloud strategy in the right place and maintaining constant and successful management of it is now an essential part of best practice for every company.
It demands the right attention, knowledge and experience required to meet the challenge, and often that means assistance from a technology partner such as BCN that understands how to optimise, govern, manage and maintain your cloud environment.
Expert View
Cloud waste can present itself in a whole host of ways, such as:
This is where Virtual Machines or cloud instances remain powered on without performing any work Uptime, compute hours and licensing costs are all still accruing in the background, even if left only overnight or across a weekend.
Development teams rely on test environments for patching and upgrades, but they are rarely cleaned up afterwards. These resources can result in spiralling costs for resources that are rarely, if ever, used.
When a VM is deleted, the associated resources like disks snapshots and IP addresses can remain and generate charges. These unattached storage volumes can be a silent drain on budgets, ticking away in the background.
Many IT teams attempt to avoid the risk of poor performance from cloud resources by allocating more power and storage that is required. This is common with lift and shift migrations where on premises hardware is simply replicated without proper rightsizing. This can also sometimes be caused by over-architecting the environment. Often cloud environments can be architected and over-engineered to protect from rare events such as a full regional outage or a major spike in user traffic to services. Although it is important to consider redundancy, disaster recovery and scaling this must be balanced with the needs of your organisation.
Not all organisations need to run a highly available dual region infrastructure for all their services as the businesses Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) mean that the impact in the event of a Disaster Recovery scenario can be mitigated more easily by re-creating or restoring services.
When architecting, cost vs benefit should always be considered, and risks should be carefully evaluated to determine whether the likelihood of that risk and the impact of the risk is bigger than the impact of not protecting against it.
RIs can offer some significant discounts against pay as you go pricing, but it only works if fully utilised and forecasted. If outdated usage patterns are catered for in the cloud, then you could be locked into payments that are simply not needed. You should ensure you are continuously evaluating your Reserved Instance usage and exchanging these to ensure you are maximising the value of these spend commitments.
Inflated storage bills can most commonly be traced to multiple copies of the same data. Without enforced version control and centralised storage policies, the same files can be found duplicated across departments leading to huge cloud waste.
The struggle to keep on top of your organisation’s cloud environments highlights how complicated and embedded the technology is. Working with Microsoft Azure over the last decade has powered thousands of companies with the ability to develop their business in terms of scale, productivity and ultimate growth. However, with so many services and configurations involved on the platform, there can be an overwhelming aspect attached to it without a more objective and comprehensive understanding of this complex tool.
Eliminating cloud waste means being able to fully recognise and identify usage and costs. This may involve bespoke tools and processes beyond the scope of an in-house IT team. Cloud Management & Optimisation involves a specific skill set that is extremely difficult to cater for without the expertise input of a third-part technology partner.
It’s extremely well documented just how important security and compliance issues are across your IT estate. This can often divert time, focus and resources away from issues requiring similar attention that don’t grab as many headlines. Avoiding security catastrophes can easily spread teams too thin, and costs mount up elsewhere through inefficiencies such as cloud waste.
Shifting teams and departments towards a culture of accountability and optimisation is difficult. As cloud computing evolves into the next generation, there has to be a sea change from making things work to making them as cost-efficient as possible too, with constant monitoring and reviews.
As you can see, the solutions needed to tackle cloud waste involve full visibility across all your cloud resources in the most holistic way possible. These findings will undoubtedly inform a new strategy to be rolled out with efficiency at the core and proactive maintenance and management as an integral supporting pillar.
However, there are actions that can be addressed immediately, to at least provide the fundamental information required to make any decisions with.
Tools such as Azure Cost Management & Billing offer a granular view of your cloud spend to uncover anomalies and trends. Usage patterns become visible to find any idle, orphaned or oversized resources. CloudHealth, for example, will then offer additional visibility for a more comprehensive solution.
Employing tools like CloudHealth can lead to recommendations on smaller SM sizes based on your actual CPU and memory usage. Try to avoid a one size fits all approach as soon as you have data and performance metrics to use.
Many Azure services and resources have auto-scaling capabilities that scale to meet demand. Additional instances or capacity are added during traffic spikes and scale down automatically when not requited. This a great way to accommodate inconsistent workloads and to meet demand. This especially helps if your organisation has seasonal spikes such as in retail or at year end.
Moving data that is rarely accessed to lower-cost storage tiers within Azure is a great way to save. For example, data lifecycle management rules can be created to automatically move files based on access patterns.
Developing a tagging strategy to label resources by department, project or owner allows for accurate cost attribution and accountability. This will help drive better housekeeping and optimisations too.
Scheduling jobs to automatically shut down via tools like CloudHealth can reduce manual human error and prevent incurred costs out of business hours. As an example, adopting automated unattached disk deletion on a weekly basis will maintain a more proactive approach to cloud resources control.
Tools such as CloudHealth can track usage in real time for continuous data on how cost effective your cloud resources are. Emails will be automatically sent to key stakeholders when an agreed percentage of your budget is reached to prevent overspend.
Educating your people with regular training and knowledge-sharing supports a framework of shared responsibility. Adding in all department reviews will encourage ongoing governance overall to make managing cloud waste a priority for your organisation. The BCN team schedules time each month to review and discuss costs, alerts and possible identified waste, our recommendations via CloudHealth provide new costings, budgeting activity and forecasting for greater up to date information.
BCN understands that the perfect technology partner is one that understands how people work. So much of the modern workplace is concerned with getting the most from products, processes and workflows, to optimise the tools used and enhance the productivity of people that run the business.
Which all means taking the time to make connections with the people that make it happen. This is exactly how we approach every relationship and project we are involved with.
When this is aligned with the knowledge, expertise and experience that comes with our status as one of the very few UK tech partners to hold all six Microsoft Partner Designations, you can be sure that your support and solutions are the highest quality available anywhere.
We have proven expertise in Azure Migrations, Cloud Optimisation, and ongoing management.
All delivered in a professional, collaborative and human way.
Our Managed Azure Service eliminates cloud waste and maximises your investment in the Azure platform, simply and efficiently. From our initial discovery work through to change management, your people will be informed, enlightened and improved at every step of the way from through communication with the BCN Managed Azure Service team.
Contact us today to get started and begin to clean up your cloud waste immediately to make savings and bolster your cloud resource capability. Our team is always happy to help and ready to talk.
Identify cloud waste in your Azure environment
Sources: techmonitor.ai, techuk.org
