Microsoft Azure brings a wide variety of benefits to modern organisations across all industries
With a comprehensive suite of tools placed at businesses’ disposal, managing the platform effectively can help to keep an enterprise running seamlessly and securely. But keeping close control of Azure and working within a framework is also essential in order to keep day-to-day operations streamlined and costs manageable. Let us explain.
Why is cost optimisation vital when it comes to Microsoft Azure?
New working models and disparate workforces – largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic – have made Microsoft Azure an even more essential asset to businesses in recent years. But while Microsoft Azure resources are inarguably useful to businesses across all industries and sizes, it’s necessary to urge caution when it comes to the budgeting involved in its implementation. Companies should be aware that keeping a close eye on Microsoft Azure is necessary in order to prevent soaring costs, particularly for ambitious organisations looking to grow and expand.
This is more important now than ever, as we find ourselves in a time of great uncertainty. The wake of the pandemic and Brexit, paired with growing business overheads, energy prices due to a utilities crisis, and employee demands mean that businesses have to be even more careful with their finances than ever before. It’s important to set up Azure in a way that is futureproof and can cater to new requirements down the line.
Gartner’s research into cloud spending shines a clear light on this issue. In 2021, overall public cloud consumption grew by 18% and hit a whopping $304.9 billion, but findings also showed that the vast majority of organisations are guilty of overshooting their cloud infrastructure budgets due to a lack of cost optimisation approaches.
The global business climate frequency is always subject to change, so companies reliant on public cloud infrastructure must keep cloud spending within budget, viewing cost optimisation as something which is not merely nice to have, but which is essential for mission success.
Syntax specialises in Microsoft Office 365 and Azure cloud infrastructure. We can help you make the most of these popular business softwares.
Key questions about how to approach Azure cost optimisation
How to master Azure cost management in your organisation
Understanding the best practices involved in Microsoft Azure cost management can help you take full control of your cloud spending and Azure resource costs, both in the present and for the future.
Quick ways to reduce Microsoft Azure costs
While effective Microsoft Azure cost optimisation is a long-term commitment, there are changes you can make to the way the cloud is used in your organisation which promote better cost management when it comes to cloud services. These include:
– Eliminating cloud waste by assessing idle and under-utilised resources, or orphaned resourced attached to terminated virtual machines (VMs).
– Optimising the various pricing models available with Microsoft Azure, depending on what works best for your organisation’s specific needs. These include a pay as you go model, Reserved Virtual Machines with a 1 or 3-year commitment, and Azure Spot VMs that service any surges in demand.
– Utilising B-Series VMs for burstable workloads, which build up credit so when full capacity is required, the cost is discounted. This can help to tackle the burstable CPU performance of workloads like web servers, small databases and more.
– Selecting the appropriate region for your Azure services, as some workloads have more flexibility than others in terms of location. Choosing a different region for certain services could result in significant cost savings.
– Optimising your storage options, as Azure offers several types of storage services. These include Blob for unstructured data storage, Files for managed file sharing, Queues for reliable messaging, Tables for structured data and Disks for block level storage volumes.
– Networking optimisation to reduce traffic across zones and regions, which can result in data transfer costs that quickly add up.
Effective Microsoft Azure cost optimisation requires you to take a critical look at a variety of factors, including your subscription, flexibility, capacity, services and scope. Understanding as much as possible about the way your business uses and handles data will stand you in good stead for making the most of your Azure resources.
Syntax IT Support can help you with Azure cost management and make the most of your cloud spending
How to strengthen Azure cost management with cloud financial management
Azure cloud financial management (FinOps) takes cost optimisation further by embedding financial accountability into everyday Azure operations. By combining Azure Cost Management tools with governance policies, resource tagging, and forecasting, organisations gain visibility and control of spend. This approach ensures cost savings become a continuous process, keeping budgets predictable and investments tied to business goals.
Why choose Syntax for ongoing Azure financial management
Syntax helps organisations put these practices into action. Our team establishes governance frameworks, proactive monitoring, and accurate forecasting, while rightsizing workloads and managing Azure Reserved Instances to cut costs by up to 72%. With continuous reporting and expert support, we make Azure cost management an ongoing discipline – not just a one-off project.
How syntax can help with the increasing overheads of the platform
Microsoft Azure has become an essential platform for businesses around the world, and across numerous industries, providing secure services that support the day to day running of even large organisations. But over time, the platform can become quite costly. As usage increases, the overheads of using the platform can grow rapidly. This is where Syntax IT Support comes in.
Syntax help clients to solve the cost problem. Using a technology from System Garden we utilise a “design template deployment” approach to Azure. This involves creating a visual deployment framework, within which Azure configurations are documented, authorised, deployed and managed.
This service provides businesses with the visibility they need to track, control and manage Azure costs in the knowledge that all proposed designs meet agreed and approved standards.
Without the visibility provided by this Azure deployment framework, companies cannot effectively track and control Azure resources leading to cost overruns.
By working with experts in the field, businesses can help themselves to deploy Azure services effectively, in a way that futureproofs both your Azure cost management and your business budgets overall.
Why a controlled approach is important to Financial Institutions and Fintech Companies
Taking a controlled approach to the use of Azure is particularly important for financial institutions and fintech companies. These kinds of organisations are often FCA regulated, and are required to demonstrate the ability to recover from a ransomware attack when required.
Using System Garden deployment frameworks enables businesses to track and control governance and risk and replicate Azure templates with total precision and speed when required.
Microsoft Azure services make use of all that the cloud offers to provide hundreds of services and products for businesses – empowering employers and their teams to work seamlessly and securely.
However, over time the costs involved in using Azure resources can grow alongside your business needs, making effective Microsoft Azure cost optimisation absolutely essential to cloud migration.
We’re going to take a closer look at the numerous benefits of Azure cloud resources, as well as exploring the need for effective Azure cost optimisation in your organisation. By learning to optimise Azure costs, you can both save on cloud spending and making the most of all the Azure services and solutions.
A framework that reflects your needs
Effective cloud cost optimisation and Azure cost management starts with the right framework. This requires you to understand your organisation’s needs, obtaining a clear view of the landscape of your business, its goals, individual units and teams. This can be done by interviewing teams to understand their current and upcoming projects, reviewing past projects to gain an understanding of cloud requirements, infrastructure and budget, and verifying budgets with the finance team.
Aligning requirements across your business
From this understanding, you can create cross-organisational alignment, as Azure cost management will undoubtedly impact multiple teams. You’ll need to convene with teams and departments to understand what is needed in terms of resources, correlating business KPIs with projected cloud spend. This will make it easier to explain cost management activities and gain approval from various sectors.
Tagging and monitoring your cloud spending
Once you know which tags need to be applied to deployed Azure resources, you should undertake a mandatory tagging strategy to ensure that spending can be monitored and compliance can be enforced. You’ll be able to gather a comprehensive and unified report of your cloud spending, based on the business logic of your company.
Uncovering opportunities to save
When you’ve successfully tagged, mapped and monitored your cloud infrastructure footprint, you’ll be left with a huge amount of information. As such, you’ll need to balance potential savings against the complexity and resources required to realise those savings, in order to identify the best places to reduce costs. It’s best to take a systematic approach which assesses compute, storage and network infrastructure, using modern tools to calculate potential savings rather than simply summarising current costs.
Managing Azure costs now and in the future
With these potential savings noted, you can establish ongoing processes to reduce costs both today and in the future. Creating cost alerts to identify anomalous spend is easy to do, and can help you manage cloud costs in the future. You should also carry out frequent reviews of cloud spend and optimisation recommendations provided by cost management tools.
This framework provides the Azure digital blueprint to ensure businesses comply with their specific compliance and governance policies.
With nearly three decades’ experience in providing IT support services, the team at Syntax are on hand to help you master the art of Azure cost management and cloud spend with System Garden.
Learn more about Syntax Security for Financial Services
