A real-life example of how a lack of careful planning and monitoring can lead to unexpected cloud spend costs.
“I forgot I had that!”
It’s clear: we’re moving to a subscription-based world. Months go by and we finally notice that we’ve been paying $$$ every month for services we’re not using any longer, or that we’re over-provisioned and are only using a fraction of what we subscribed to. We’ve all been there. It’s so important to be vigilant with your dollars – it’s your responsibility, not the provider’s – to carefully manage and monitor what you’re paying for a service from another entity.
Case in point: overpaying $20K/year
A public sector customer did their own lift and shift of several critical workloads into Azure to vacate an aging data center. The customer handled all of the planning, design, and budgeting internally. A year into the endeavor, the customer contacted Inviso saying their operating costs were far more than they’d planned for. They were considering scrapping all their efforts and moving back on-premises. The cloud was just too costly.
Enter Inviso. After investigatory conversations with the customer, it became clear that the customer simply did not have a full understanding of what they were paying for. We did an Azure Health Check and in less than two hours were able to identify $20,000/ year in savings.
Some of the key findings:
- Inviso discovered a server on which the customer had migrated a workload to Azure and attached a 12TB premium. Inviso went into the operating system and showed the customer that, while only 1 TB of the disk was allocated to Windows, they had been paying an hourly metered rate for 12 TB of storage that was never available for Windows to consume.
- Using Azure Advisor and other performance metrics, Inviso quickly observed that the environment was over-provisioned. We immediately guided the customer through a right-sizing exercise to start realizing cost savings. VMs were powered down and re-sized as needed. Virtual machine storage was also downsized to a lower tier of performance.
- Inviso identified additional Azure services that had been provisioned but were no longer needed. For example, multiple bastion hosts were incurring unnecessary daily costs, and storage accounts from previous replications hadn’t been cleaned up. Inviso guided the customer through disabling and cleaning up unused services, allowing them to realize immediate savings.
- Inviso conducted a review of the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant and discovered they weren’t fully using their E5 licenses. This meant they were missing out on critical security features and advanced capabilities. For example, they were licensed for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and missed a golden opportunity to move away from a legacy anti-malware/anti-virus application.
With this background information, the customer immediately implemented Inviso’s recommendations to start taking advantage of the savings. We then provided educational workshops on the benefits of E5 licensing, as well as enabling key components with the customer to harden and secure their tenant.
Are you overpaying? Bring us in and let’s find out!
Having a fresh perspective on your IT investment will almost always uncover cost savings opportunities. Inviso offers years of expertise helping clients take greater advantage of their cloud infrastructure, modern work, and security tools.
Whether you’re a startup or a blooming business preparing for a major expansion, Inviso would love to partner with you to ensure a successful, secure, and cost-conscious journey.
It’s easy to get started with your Azure Health Check.
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