Azure's consumption-based billing model is one of its greatest strengths and one of its greatest risks. Without proper governance, it's easy to accumulate unused resources, oversized virtual machines and forgotten storage accounts that silently inflate your monthly bill. Here are five changes most organisations can make immediately.
1. Right-Size Your Virtual Machines
Azure Advisor will flag VMs that are consistently using less than 5% of their allocated CPU. In our experience, most organisations have at least a handful of development or test VMs that were provisioned at production size and never resized. Dropping from a D4s v3 (4 vCPU, 16GB) to a D2s v3 (2 vCPU, 8GB) cuts the compute cost by roughly 50%.
2. Delete Orphaned Disks and Snapshots
When a VM is deleted, its managed disks are often left behind still incurring storage charges. Use the Azure Portal's Disks blade, filter by "Unattached", and delete anything that isn't needed. Similarly, review your snapshots many organisations retain snapshots far longer than necessary.
3. Enable Auto-Shutdown on Development VMs
Development and test VMs that run 24/7 are paying for 16 hours of compute every night that nobody is using them. Azure's built-in Auto-Shutdown feature takes two minutes to configure and can reduce your compute costs for non-production environments by 5070%.
4. Review Storage Tiers
Azure Blob Storage offers Hot, Cool and Archive tiers. Data that is accessed infrequently backups, compliance archives, log files should be moved to Cool or Archive tier. Cool storage costs roughly 50% less than Hot for storage capacity, though retrieval costs are higher. The Azure Storage Lifecycle Management policy can automate this transition.
5. Set Budget Alerts
This sounds obvious, but a surprising number of organisations have no alerting configured on their Azure subscriptions. Set a budget in Azure Cost Management that alerts at 80% and 100% of your expected monthly spend. This won't reduce your costs directly, but it will ensure you know about overruns before they compound over multiple months.
If you'd like a structured Azure cost review, Electriclatte offers FinOps assessments for organisations of all sizes. Get in touch to find out more.