£6.42m in Immediate Azure Savings for a Major Telecoms Business
A telecoms leader identified £6.42m in immediate Azure savings, plus a further £8m in compute efficiencies, by introducing tagging and structured optimisation across its estate.
Company Overview
The client is a major telecommunications business spending roughly £40 million a year on cloud services, with further migrations planned that were expected to push that figure higher still.
It already had visibility into its estate, so this was not a case of flying blind, but without a clear tagging policy or structured FinOps practices it struggled to track costs across business units or control how resources were allocated.
Problem Statement
Visibility on its own is not control. The business could see what it had, yet without a consistent way to label resources (tagging) it could not reliably attribute spend to the teams and business units responsible for it, and that gap made disciplined resource allocation very hard to enforce as the estate kept growing.
Outcome Delivered
The business identified £6.42 million in immediate savings, made up of £2.1 million from resizing application capacity and £4.32 million from resource and environment recommendations, with a further £8 million in compute efficiencies in sight, and a comprehensive tagging policy and governance practices now hold spend down as further migrations land.
Executive Overview
The review identified £6.42 million in immediate savings, made up of £2.1 million from resizing application capacity and £4.32 million from resource and environment-based recommendations. The compute analysis surfaced a further £8 million of potential savings that could be realised through more strategic use of Azure services over time.
Beyond the numbers, the engagement put governance practices in place so the gains could be sustained rather than eroded by the next wave of migration.
Our Approach
Using Optimus, we carried out a detailed review of storage, databases and compute across the Azure estate, looking specifically for where capacity, provisioning and environment practices were costing more than they needed to.
Alongside the technical work we developed a comprehensive tagging policy, so that spend could be attributed cleanly across business units and cost governance had a foundation to stand on rather than being applied after the fact.
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.
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Send an EnquiryLarge and growing spend
Around £40 million a year was going to cloud services, with further migrations planned that were set to increase it.
No tagging policy
Without a consistent tagging policy, resources could not be reliably labelled by owner, team or purpose.
Costs hard to track by unit
Spend was difficult to track across business units, so accountability for cost sat with no one in particular.
Loose resource allocation
Resource allocation was hard to control in a structured way as the estate expanded.
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.
Full estate review with Optimus
Optimus drove a detailed review of storage, databases and compute, turning a £40m estate into specific, costed opportunities.
Application capacity resizing
Resizing application capacity to match real demand accounted for £2.1 million of the immediate savings.
Resource and environment tuning
Resource and environment-based recommendations accounted for a further £4.32 million, the larger share of the immediate total.
Compute efficiency analysis
A deeper compute analysis pointed to around £8 million more, achievable through more strategic use of Azure services over time.
Comprehensive tagging policy
A comprehensive tagging policy gave the business a way to attribute spend cleanly across business units for the first time.
Governance to sustain savings
Governance practices were established so the optimisation would hold as further migrations increased the estate.