A retail company was running a $2.1M-a-year Azure estate built on launch-day sizing and pay-as-you-go rates. We took it to $1.45M, a 31 percent reduction, with Hybrid Benefit, disk rightsizing and reservations, on a clean baseline.
A mid-market retailer ran its e-commerce platform, warehouse systems and analytics on Azure, spending about $2.1M a year. The estate had grown organically: virtual machines sized for launch-day peaks that never recurred, Premium SSD disks attached to workloads that did not need the throughput, Windows Server and SQL Server licenses sitting unused while the same workloads paid full pay-as-you-go rates, and no commitment coverage at all. Spend had never been optimized, and finance had no forecast it trusted.
$2.1M annual Azure spend · 100% pay-as-you-go · no Hybrid Benefit applied · oversized VMs and Premium disks throughout · no budgets or anomaly alerts.
We worked the engagement in our standard order, See, Cut, Lock, Run, so that every discount landed on a baseline that was already right-sized.
We normalized the spend with FOCUS data and fixed tagging through Azure Policy and management groups, so every dollar mapped to a workload and an owner. That made the waste visible and gave us a baseline we could safely commit against later.
We moved disks from Premium to Standard SSD wherever the workload did not need the higher tier, following our managed disk guidance, and right-sized the oversized virtual machines down to fit actual utilization. Idle and orphaned resources, unattached disks and stopped-but-billing VMs, were cleared. This removed roughly half of the total saving before any rate change.
The retailer already owned Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance, but none were applied to Azure. We mapped them through Azure Hybrid Benefit, cutting the rate on eligible VMs substantially. Only then, on the now right-sized and Hybrid-Benefit-covered baseline, did we buy reservations on the steady core of the estate, leaving the variable seasonal layer on pay-as-you-go.
We set budgets and anomaly alerts in Cost Management and enforced tagging so new deployments cannot land without an owner, keeping the savings from drifting back as the platform evolves.
Annual Azure spend fell from $2.1M to $1.45M, a 31 percent reduction, recovering about $650K a year. Roughly half came from rightsizing and idle cleanup, and half from Hybrid Benefit and reservations applied on the clean baseline. Finance gained a forecast it could defend.
The sequencing was the whole game. Had the retailer bought reservations first, as many teams do, the discount would have been locked onto oversized VMs paying full license rates, and most of the 31 percent would never have materialized. The order, rightsize and apply Hybrid Benefit first, then commit, is what made the saving both large and durable.
We will map your Azure spend, find the waste, model the right Hybrid Benefit and commitment mix, and tell you the number. On the performance model, you pay only from realized savings. No savings, no fee.
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