Why Your Azure Bill Keeps Growing (And Ways to Stop It)

Azure bills have a nasty habit of escalating without warning. One month you're paying £3,000, the next it's £8,000, and you're not entirely sure what happened. Here's why Azure costs spiral and how to regain control.

The Azure Cost Trap

Unlike traditional IT purchases, Azure charges accumulate continuously:

• Virtual machines by the minute
• Storage by the gigabyte
• Data transfers by usage
• Even "stopped" VMs can generate costs
  
  

Common scenario: A startup's Azure spend grew from £800 to £12,000 monthly without anyone noticing until the invoice arrived.

The Five Biggest Azure Money Pits

1. Oversized Virtual Machines

The problem: VMs configured for peak capacity but running at 15% utilisation.

Real example: Development VMs costing £140 monthly with identical performance available for £30 monthly.

Solution: Performance monitoring reveals actual requirements, enabling 50-70% VM cost reductions.

2. Always-On Development Environments

The problem: Dev and test resources running 24/7 when used 8 hours daily.

Hidden cost: One client discovered £4,200 monthly waste from idle development VMs.

Automation fix: Scheduled shutdown saves 65% of development compute costs automatically.

3. Ignoring Azure Hybrid Benefit

The problem: Paying full Azure prices when existing Windows licences provide discounts.

Missed savings: Up to 55% reduction on Windows VMs for eligible organisations.

Reality: Most businesses with on-premises Windows servers qualify but never apply this benefit.

4. Premium Everything

The problem: Premium storage and networking for workloads that don't need it.

Cost impact: Premium SSD storage costs 300% more than standard alternatives for equivalent capacity.

Smart approach: Match storage performance to actual application requirements, not theoretical maximums.

5. No Reserved Instances

The problem: Paying hourly rates for predictable workloads.

Savings potential: 40-70% cost reduction for stable production environments.

Strategy: Start with 1-year commitments for obvious candidates like databases and web servers.

FinOps: The Systematic Solution

Financial Operations (FinOps) brings discipline to Azure spending through three phases:

1. Visibility: Understanding what you're spending and why
2. Accountability: Departmental ownership of cloud costs
3. Optimisation: Systematic reduction of waste and inefficiency
   
   
   

Getting Started

Azure cost control requires ongoing attention, not one-time fixes:

1. Audit current spending patterns and identify obvious waste
2. Rightsize VMs based on performance monitoring
3. Implement automation for development environment management
4. Apply Hybrid Benefit if you have existing Windows licences
5. Plan reserved instances for predictable workloads
   
   
   

Need help controlling runaway Azure costs?
Qwantro's Microsoft specialists provide free assessments and ongoing optimisation for businesses.