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Azure Pricing Factors

Azure pricing is one of the key factors that a business takes into account when planning their cloud strategy. Find out how we can help you manage costs.

Key Benefits of igroup’s Approach

Our Azure specialists are dedicated to providing clients with a service that helps deliver the best possible results while managing budgets effectively.  Working with us means you benefit from:

  • A dedicated and fully accredited UK based Azure team
  • Working with an established Microsoft Gold Partner
  • Ongoing optimisation to manage costs and performance
  • SLAs for uptime that exceed Microsoft’s own
  • Transparent pricing for all resources

To find out more about how igroup can help you maximise your use of Microsoft Azure, please contact a member of our team today on 0203 697 0302 or fill in your details below and we will call you back.

Azure Pricing  Overview

The Microsoft Cloud is a highly flexible platform with global reach and massive scale that is suitable for application and data hosting.

Azure Pricing is determined by multiple factors, but is all based on the amount of resource you have specified and the amount that you use it.

At the most fundamental level, your Azure pricing will be based on the number of virtual machines that are required.  These range from basic, low powered VMs designed for lightweight tasks through to more powerful specialised machines that are used for computationally intensive work such as graphics processing.

Did You Know

AWS and Azure pricing can change every month affecting your monthly billing.  By choosing igroup, your pricing is capped for the duration of your 1, 2 or 3-year contract, eliminating spikes in your billing.

A typical deployment will utilise multiple different machine types which are selected for specific roles.

The second component of Azure pricing is the amount of consumtpion.  Typically, VM pricing in Azure is determined at an hourly rate.

The lowest power machines cost less than 1p per hour to run while the most powerful machines can cost closer to £40 per hour of usage.

Alongside the VMs, the amount of data that you store and the frequency with which it is written in Azure can have cost implications.  The type of storage you need will be determined by how frequently you are requesting and using it – the amount of bandwidth.

Importantly, Azure pricing is not fixed – exchange rates can also mean that costs will vary from month to month, particularly if you have a global deployment using different data centres in different territories.

Managing Azure Costs

As noted above, the machines you use in your deployment and the amount of data you consume are the key elements in Azure pricing, however it is possible to manage your consumption and configuration to make it more cost efficient.

igroup developed our Cloud Control Service to manage cloud deployments.  In simple terms this manages the amount of resource you have provisioned based on usage.  An example of how it works might be that it moves a particular service from a higher tier of machine during peak demand to a lower tier during off-peak times.

This approach means that you still retain the highest levels of performance when you need them, but don’t pay for them when you don’t.

How Azure is Charged

Depending on who you buy Azure through, you may pay in a variety of different ways.

Working directly with Microsoft will usually mean paying via a credit card.  This can mean unpredictable costs from month to month if you use more resource in a particular period.  Unpredictable pricing can mean that businesses cut back on services without investigating the cause.

Working with a cloud partner such as igroup can help to better manage IT costs.  This solution is often better for businesses who want to work under a purchase order system, as the partner owns the relationship with Microsoft and offers you payment terms in line with their own billing cycles.  This can make Azure pricing more manageable.

Managing Azure Costs

The biggest advantage that Azure’s flexibility brings to businesses migrating their data to the cloud is the ability to quickly change the infrastructure that is used.

This can be achieved in two main ways:

  • Long term analysis and asset management
  • Dynamic usage analysis and optimisation

Regular assessments of consumption are an important aspect of management.  This helps to ensure that the performance levels offered by your solution match expectations and that applications run correctly for the number of users and volume of data being processed.  Over time, most businesses find that the amount that they store in the cloud increases, so regular assessments help to manage the resource level.

A reporting tool attached to your infrastructure helps to manage Azure pricing more dynamically.  Real time analysis of usage, coupled with the ability to scale up the machines used to service that usage, means that rather than running costly higher performance virtual machines all the time, you can back down to lower spec machines when demand is lower.

Igroup’s approach to managing the cloud needs of our clients uses both of the above methods to ensure that they do not pay for resource that they don’t need, and more importantly, benefit from a cloud deployment that maximises performance during peak times and improves the ability of the business to process and share information.

Call now on 0203 697 0302 to speak to a member of our team

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