Your cloud bill is too high. Here is where the money is going.

Cloud is supposed to be cheaper. Then the first year’s invoices arrive and the finance team asks why the number keeps climbing while headcount stays flat.

In our cost reviews the money nearly always hides in the same places.

Oversized virtual machines

Servers migrated from on-premises hardware arrive in the cloud with the same specifications they had before, sized for a peak that happened once in 2019. Right-sizing based on 30 days of real utilization is the single biggest saving in most environments.

Paying on-demand for things that never turn off

A domain controller or database server runs 24 hours a day, every day. Paying on-demand rates for that is like renting a car by the hour for a year. Reserved instances or savings plans cut the rate for committed workloads by a third or more.

Storage nobody remembers

Snapshots from a migration two years ago. Disks detached from deleted servers. Backup retention set to “forever.” Storage is cheap per gigabyte and expensive in aggregate.

Development environments running all weekend

Test and development systems that could be off 128 hours a week are running 168. Scheduled shutdowns are a few lines of automation.

Data leaving the cloud

Egress charges surprise everyone. If an application on-premises pulls data out of the cloud constantly, the architecture is fighting the pricing model.

Licensing you already own

Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with software assurance can often be brought to the cloud instead of paying for them again in the hourly rate.

What a review looks like

We pull 30 to 90 days of billing and utilization data, produce a ranked list of changes with the saving for each, and implement them in order of return. The first pass typically lands between 20 and 40 percent.

Talk to our cloud team if your bill has stopped making sense.