Immediate Waste Elimination
Decommissioned legacy development databases and unused VMs. Configured scheduled shutdowns for remaining active dev instances.
Cleanup
Microsoft Solution Partner
|Open-source · No vendor lock-inUSA · UK · India +44-20-3286-7573
Case Study
Azure Spend Cut From £45k to £27k/Month — £216,000 Saved in Year One
How a UK SaaS company with 80 employees established a comprehensive FinOps framework, rightsized over-provisioned infrastructure, and cut cloud costs by 40% with zero performance impact. Delivered in 8 weeks.
At a Glance Metrics
- £18,000/mo
- Monthly Cloud SavingsBill reduced from £45,000 to £27,000.
- 97%
- Resource Tag CoverageUp from 40%, enabling full product-level cost tracking.
- 61%
- Reserved Instance CoverWorkloads shifted from pay-as-you-go pricing.
Client Background
The client is a UK-based SaaS business providing a B2B workflow platform to mid-market companies in the legal and compliance sector. At the time of engagement, the business had 80 employees and approximately £6.5 million in annual recurring revenue. The product was fully cloud-native, deployed on Microsoft Azure, and had been growing steadily for 7 years.
Azure was the business's largest technology cost. And it was growing faster than revenue. The CTO had a strong engineering background and a capable internal team, but the team's priorities were feature development and platform reliability — not cost governance. Cloud cost management had never been formally owned by anyone.
The Challenge: Visibility Gaps & Exploding Budgets
The lack of infrastructure governance led to several core issues:
- Lack of Cost Visibility: Cloud costs were reviewed as a single board line item with no breakdown by product, environment, or workloads.
- Abandoned Infrastructure: Staging/dev environments created for historical product launches were still running at full capacity long after completion.
- Inefficient Workload Pricing: Stable, predictable production workloads were billed on expensive pay-as-you-go pricing rather than reserved instances.
Execution Strategy
The Solution: 8-Week Cloud FinOps Engagement
A structured programme focused on immediate waste elimination and long-term cost governance.
Rightsizing & Reservs
Optimised VM sizes based on CPU/memory utilization profiles. Moved infrequently accessed storage to cold/archive tiers.
RightsizingReserved InstancesTagging & Governance
Remediated tag coverage and enforced policies via Azure Policy. Built real-time Power BI cost dashboards with Slack anomaly alerts.
Azure PolicyPower BIForecasting Framework
Implemented a rolling 6-month budget forecast, allowing the finance team to align infrastructure spending with product roadmap plans.
Forecasting
Performance and Cost Validation
Every rightsizing and migration step was validated against performance metrics before being finalized. Post-project validation confirmed zero degradation in production application performance:
- P95 API response times remained unchanged.
- Error rates stayed within normal thresholds.
- Overall throughput capacity was maintained.
The savings generated by the project paid for the entire engagement in less than 4 weeks.
Approach
Delivery Phases
A repeatable approach to cloud cost reduction.
- 01Phase 1
Discovery (1 week)
Full Azure estate audit, cost profiling, waste identification, and stakeholder interviews leading to a fixed-fee proposal.
- 02Phase 2
Build & Optimise (7 weeks)
Executing waste elimination, compute/storage rightsizing, governance rules, and dashboard deployment in weekly sprints.
- 03Phase 3
Measure & Maintain
Post-engagement performance validation, monthly actual-vs-budget reviews, and annual FinOps healthchecks.
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