Over €750,000 in Annual Cloud Savings for a Leasing & Mobility Software Provider
A global leasing and mobility software provider uncovered more than €750,000 in annual cloud savings, with €58,000 realisable immediately through orphaned-resource cleanup and storage reservations.
Company Overview
The client is a global leasing and mobility software company whose cloud environment had grown faster than the governance around it. Rising costs, legacy application complexity and insufficient tagging meant leadership had limited visibility into where money was going, which customers were profitable, and which workloads were carrying technical debt.
A closer look revealed that key virtual machines were being used at less than 4% of their capacity, and that the legacy application estate was holding the team back from adopting modern, scalable cloud features.
Problem Statement
When an estate grows faster than its controls, the symptoms are predictable: cost rises, profitability becomes murky, and old applications quietly block the move to anything more efficient. The task was to regain control without disrupting the business that depends on the platform.
Outcome Delivered
A two-week Discovery surfaced more than €750,000 in annual savings, with €58,000 realisable immediately at zero risk, over €625,000 from rightsizing, auto-scheduling and chipset upgrades that also lifted performance by 20 to 30%, and a further €115,000 from reservations, all wrapped in a tagging strategy and maturity assessment to sustain the result.
Executive Overview
The engagement identified more than €750,000 in potential annual savings, with €58,000 immediately realisable at zero business risk through unused-resource cleanup and no-regret storage reservations. A further €625,000 or more was available through rightsizing of VMs, databases and disks, auto-scheduling of non-production environments, and chipset upgrades that also improved performance by 20 to 30%.
An additional €115,000 in annualised savings was identified through a reservations analysis once the wastage and rightsizing work was complete, and the client also received a fit-for-purpose tagging strategy and a FinOps maturity assessment to sustain the gains.
Our Approach
We ran a two-week Discovery Phase covering the full Azure estate, using Optimus to analyse resource utilisation across virtual machines, databases and disks and to quantify both wastage and rightsizing opportunities. We identified immediate-realisation initiatives first, including orphaned resources and no-regret storage reservations that carried no business impact.
A validation and impact assessment then quantified rightsizing savings, auto-scheduling opportunities for non-production environments, and chipset upgrade benefits, and a final reservations analysis priced the discount opportunity on the remaining stable workloads. The engagement concluded with a FinOps maturity assessment and a tagging strategy to embed governance.
Challenges
Challenges Faced
Every engagement starts with a clear-eyed view of what was actually getting in the way, because you cannot fix what you cannot see. Here we set out the real constraints the client was working within, the costs and risks they were carrying, and the gaps that needed closing before any meaningful progress could be made.
Let's Transform Your Enterprise Today
Send an EnquiryCloud outgrew governance
The cloud environment had grown faster than the governance built around it, so control had slipped.
Rising cost and legacy complexity
Rising costs combined with legacy application complexity made the estate hard to reason about.
Tagging too thin to see spend
Insufficient tagging left leadership without a clear view of spend or customer profitability.
Severe VM underutilisation
Key virtual machines were running at less than 4% of their capacity, a striking level of waste.
Deployed solutions
What We Did
A look at how we approached the work, from the first discovery sessions through to the changes we put in place, and the thinking behind each decision along the way. The aim is always the same, to deliver something measurable that the client owns and can build on, rather than a one-off fix that fades once we leave.
Two-week Azure Discovery
A two-week Discovery Phase used Optimus to analyse utilisation across VMs, databases and disks and quantify the opportunity.
Immediate zero-risk wins
€58,000 was realisable immediately at zero business risk, through orphaned-resource cleanup and no-regret storage reservations.
Rightsizing VMs, databases and disks
Rightsizing virtual machines, databases and disks formed the core of the €625,000-plus of further savings.
Auto-scheduling non-production
Auto-scheduling non-production environments removed the cost of running test and development capacity out of hours.
Chipset upgrades
Chipset upgrades cut cost while also improving performance by 20 to 30%, a rare win on both fronts.
Reservations and governance
A reservations analysis added €115,000 in annualised savings, alongside a tagging strategy and maturity assessment to hold the gains.