Cutting a third off a growing Azure bill without touching performance

The client's Azure bill had crept up steadily as projects came and went, with no single owner. Oversized VMs, orphaned disks, idle non-production environments and unassigned Microsoft 365 licences had accumulated over more than a year, and a renewal was forcing the conversation.

• Ran a full estate assessment across compute, storage and licensing to baseline real utilisation
• Right-sized oversized VMs and removed orphaned disks and idle test environments
• Applied reserved instances and a savings-plan strategy to steady-state workloads
• Reclaimed unassigned and over-specified Microsoft 365 licences
• Put continuous monitoring and board-ready monthly reporting in place so savings stick

• Around 34% of Azure spend recovered
• No impact on application performance, every change was based on real usage data
• A repeatable monthly cost discipline replaced the annual renewal panic