Seven practical ways to cut your cloud bill

When we assess a cloud environment for the first time, we almost always find meaningful waste. Not because anyone did anything wrong, but because cloud estates grow faster than they get tidied. Here are the seven savings we find most often.

1. Switch off what nobody uses

Dev environments running at weekends. Proof-of-concept VMs from last year. Orphaned disks attached to nothing. A simple inventory pass usually finds 5-10% of spend that can simply be turned off.

2. Right-size over-provisioned resources

Most VMs and databases are sized for a peak that never arrives. Check actual CPU and memory usage over 30 days and size to reality, with headroom. This is often the single biggest saving.

3. Use reservations and savings plans

If a workload will clearly run for the next year, commit to it. One and three year reservations routinely save 30-60% versus pay-as-you-go rates. Start with your most stable workloads.

4. Tier your storage

Old backups and logs sitting on premium storage are pure waste. Move infrequently accessed data to cool or archive tiers automatically with lifecycle policies.

5. Schedule non-production environments

Development and test environments rarely need to run nights and weekends. Automated start-stop schedules cut their cost by 60-70% with no loss of capability.

6. Review data transfer and licensing

Cross-region traffic, unnecessary public egress, and SQL licences that could use hybrid benefit are quiet, recurring costs. They are dull to review and very much worth it.

7. Make costs visible to the people who create them

The most durable saving is cultural. When each team sees its own cloud spend each month, waste stops accumulating. Tag resources by team or product and share the numbers.

Where to start

Do them in order. The first two need no commitment and typically fund everything else. If you would like a second pair of eyes, we offer a free initial assessment and usually find 20-40% of spend that can be recovered.