Nobody decides to overspend on cloud. It happens one unused licence, one forgotten test server and one oversized database at a time. The fix is not a big project but a short, regular review with a fixed agenda. This is ours.
1. Licences: who is paying for nothing
Pull the list of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and SaaS licences and compare it with your active user list. Leavers who were never fully offboarded, shared mailboxes that got a full licence and duplicate tools are the usual suspects. This alone often saves 5 to 10 percent.
2. Idle resources
In Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, look for virtual machines with low CPU for 30 days, unattached disks and IP addresses, old snapshots, and dev or test environments that run 24 hours a day. Schedule non-production systems to shut down overnight and at weekends.
3. Right-sizing
Compare each VM and database's allocated size with its real usage. Most were sized generously at launch and never revisited. Dropping one size tier typically saves 30 to 50 percent on that resource with no visible impact.
4. Reserved capacity and savings plans
For anything you know will run for the next year, reservations or savings plans cut 30 to 60 percent off the on-demand price. Only commit to what you are confident about; the previous three steps tell you what that is.
5. Storage tiers
Backups, archives and old project files rarely need hot storage. Lifecycle rules that move data to cool or archive tiers after 30 or 90 days are set once and keep saving.
6. Data transfer and networking
Egress charges and cross-region traffic are easy to miss. Check whether backups or replication are crossing regions unnecessarily.
Make it stick
Put the review in the calendar, give it an owner, and track savings in a simple sheet so the effort is visible. Set budget alerts at 80 and 100 percent so surprises arrive early. If you would like us to run the review, our cloud cost optimisation service does exactly this each quarter and reports what changed.