How to Evaluate Azure Cost Management and Ensure You’re Getting Value for Money

1 – The Options from Microsoft, Your Cloud Provider

Billing from Microsoft

As your cloud provider, Microsoft bills you for your consumption of its IT infrastructure-as-a-service in arrears. This means that by the time you realise how much your usage has cost, it will be too late to do anything except pay the bill.

And, while you do have access to view your past and upcoming bills in the Azure cloud portal, the visibility and usability of this is far from ideal. That makes it hard to see where the surprise costs have come from.

There is a large amount of information in each bill, which is very difficult to review manually. Keeping up with every single line item and tracking it back to the related system is also too time consuming to do regularly.

Without experience in budgeting for cloud, it’s also easy to get caught with frequent fluctuations in cost due to varying usage of things like bandwidth.

To overcome your challenges with Azure cost management, a more intuitive and insightful solution is recommended.

A Word for Those with a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)

If your cloud is being delivered via a ‘cloud solution provider’ CSP arrangement, you probably won’t have access to your costs as your partner will be looking after that for you.

It’s important to move away from this situation and take back full visibility of your cloud spend.

For detailed advice and guidance with navigating a CSP, read our related article here.

Microsoft’s In-Built Tools

You do also have access to some free built-in Azure cost management tools from the platform.

On its website, Microsoft states that:

“With a full set of cloud cost management capabilities, you can take advantage of the tools included in your Azure subscription to get more value out of the cloud and implement financial governance in your organisation.”

However, you’ll have to dedicate significant time and effort configuring these before they become useful.

This is another obstacle, because it requires technical expertise and generally takes a lot of time to keep it up-to-date. You’ll either need to train an existing employee or hire a partner to do it for you, neither of which are efficient nor cost-effective options.

It’s also worth noting that even if you do configure these in-built tools to be fit for purpose, they may not remain sufficient when your requirements or cloud environment change.

2 – Third-Party Tools

Another option for Azure cost management is to utilise some third-party tools. However, most of the technology products available in this space offer no more than cost management tools, failing to provide any additional functionality or support.

While that may be fine for smaller businesses with very limited cloud usage, the majority of organisations running critical applications and business processes in the cloud will need more.

These tools also require a level of intelligence and set-up to deliver what’s needed. This is even further investment of time, effort, and possibly budget.

To truly stay on top of a dynamic, scalable cloud environment, your organisation should ideally have intuitive monitoring, automated reporting, and easy-to-use optimisation tools in place as well.

3 – Cloud Consultants

Another place to look is Microsoft’s network of technology partners and consultancy firms. This is the option most businesses choose whenever they need additional help making their cloud investment a success.

While working with a consultant is a common approach, there are some significant considerations that need to be made before you decide to do so.

• Firstly, much like the above point about third-party tools, enlisting the help of an Azure consultant will first require its own sizable investment of both time and money. When your goals are to gain better control of costs and reduce your spending, this is often a counter-productive exercise.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that your consultant might even make recommendations that don’t prove helpful to you, or offer solutions are too complex to implement without further investment.

• A consultant tasked with helping you gain control of your cloud spending will deliver this as a one-off project for you, which means they’re only providing insight into that one specific moment in time.

To go back to the earlier point about the cloud being ever-changing, you should hopefully see why this service would be insufficient.

The visibility you gain into your costs must be ongoing, capable of changing and updating as your cloud usage fluctuates.

• A consultant will only provide you with a closer look at your cloud usage and spending, but that’s just the first step.

Beyond that, you’ll still need guidance with optimising your cloud environment, understanding the risks, maintaining performance and security, and many other ongoing decisions.

A consultant’s offering will be limited, and won’t help you get into a better situation with Azure cost management in the long-term.

Further reading