Cost Optimisation Assessment

The cost optimisation assessment will evaluate spend and utilisation patterns to identify cost-saving opportunities, reduce waste, and enhance the overall cost-effectiveness of your cloud environment. It involves analysing cloud billing data, usage patterns, and cost drivers, identifying areas of overspending or underutilisation, and developing recommendations for cost optimisation. The assessment covers resource allocation, data storage, billing models, and governance policies. The assessment aims to find ways to get the most value out of your cloud investment. The outcome may include a range of areas:

• Cost savings: a summary of the cost savings and a breakdown of each area identified for cost optimisation.
• Identified cost drivers: the main drivers of cloud costs, such as underutilised or over-provisioned instances and storage SKUs that are not being used efficiently.
• Optimisation: recommendations to optimise your cloud resources, such as reducing the number of instances via co-hosting, downscaling instances to lower-cost configurations, and reducing the amount of premium storage used.
• Right-sizing and plans: commentary on right-size instances, SKUs/plans to match actual usage patterns of your workloads to avoid over-provisioning and under-utilisation of instances. Storage options for different types of data such as leveraging cold or archive tiers or enabling compression to reduce costs. Identify savings through purchasing Reserved Instances/Capacity (RIs) or Saving Plans.
• Automation and scheduling: how scheduling and auto-scaling could be leveraged to automate starting, stopping, or scaling instances appropriately.
• Cost-effective services: options to explore cost-effective services, such as reserved instances and spot instances, or alternative services, such as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to distribute content globally while reducing the load on compute resources.
• Orphaned resources: resources that are no longer being used or needed by services, such as unattached disks, unused public IP addresses and load balancers which could lead to increased cost and security risk.

After the assessment, a follow-up Statement of Work can be requested and scheduled, such as:

• Governance and policies: enable budgets, monitoring, cost alerts, dashboards, tagging strategies, and policies to enforce cost compliance.
• Implement changes: right-size resources, consolidate and co-host resources as identified, apply for reserved instances, tweak SKUs and plans, add auto-scaling rules, implement automation, deploy new services (e.g., CDN) or migrate to alternative cloud services.
• Resource migration: migrate resources to new subscriptions (Azure) to leverage dev/test pricing and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) reseller rates.