Cloud spendthat outgrewthe business.
AWS, Azure, and GCP run-rate reduced by surfacing waste, restructuring commitments, and building cost discipline your engineers will keep. Prioritized by financial impact, minimal engineering lift.
The bill doubled. Revenue did not. Nobody owns the gap.
Workloads were lifted into the cloud without being redesigned for it. Reserved capacity and savings plans were bought at a scale the business no longer runs at, or never bought at all. Storage tiers, data transfer, idle environments, and over-provisioned instances accumulate. Engineering has no incentive to challenge it and finance has no way to.
We sit between the two. A commercial view of the estate, a plan ranked by dollars saved per hour of engineering effort, a renegotiated commitment with the provider, and monthly governance so the trend stays down.
Idle and orphaned resources
Environments spun up for a project that ended, test instances nobody shut down, storage volumes with nothing attached to them. The single most common finding in a first pass.
Reserved capacity mismatched to demand
Savings plans and reserved instances bought for a footprint the business no longer runs at, or never bought at all, leaving spend sitting at the highest on-demand rate.
Storage on the wrong tier
Data sitting in premium, low-latency storage that hasn’t been touched in months, or backups retained well past any policy that actually requires it.
Data transfer nobody accounted for
Cross-region and cross-service transfer charges that show up as a line item nobody can explain, usually because nobody was watching the architecture that created them.
Non-production environments running full time
Dev, staging, and QA billed at production rates around the clock, when the business only needs them during working hours.
Spend and workload analysis
Every account, every service, every environment. Where the money goes, what is idle, what is over-provisioned, what is on the wrong tier.
- Account and service spend map
- Idle and orphaned resource discovery
- Right-sizing analysis
- Storage and data transfer review
- Environment and non-production review
Commitment and contract restructuring
Reserved instances, savings plans, and enterprise agreements re-cut to fit actual workloads. Provider negotiation on credits, discounts, and terms.
- Commitment coverage analysis
- Savings plan and RI strategy
- Enterprise agreement negotiation
- Credit and discount capture
- Multi-cloud and exit terms
Reduction program
A prioritized list of actions ranked by savings per engineering hour, run with your engineering lead, tracked weekly.
- Prioritized action backlog
- Change sequencing
- Engineering coordination
- Weekly savings tracking
- Risk and resilience review
Governance
Tagging, budgets, alerts, and a monthly cost review finance and engineering both attend. Resilience, recovery, and concentration risk treated as business decisions.
- Tagging and allocation model
- Budgets and anomaly alerts
- Monthly cost review
- FinOps operating rhythm
- Resilience and concentration review
Assess
Read access to billing and the estate. Two weeks to a ranked opportunity list with dollar values.
Commit
Restructure the commitments and renegotiate the provider agreement while the reduction program starts.
Reduce
Run the backlog with engineering. Biggest savings, least change, first.
Govern
Monthly review, budgets, alerts. Engineering owns it, finance can see it.
Cloud spend that had outgrown the business it supported.
A digital media company's cloud bill had doubled in two years while revenue grew far more slowly. Engineering had no incentive to challenge it and finance had no way to.
24%
Reduction in monthly cloud run rate
Straight answers.
Do we need to migrate providers?
Almost never. The savings are in how you use the provider you have, and in the commercial agreement with them.
How much engineering time does this take?
Less than most expect. We rank every action by savings per engineering hour, and the top of the list is usually commercial and configuration change, not re-architecture.
Can this be done during a PE hold?
It is one of the fastest EBITDA levers in a technology-heavy portfolio company, and we run it as part of 100-day plans regularly.
What is the monthly cloud bill?
Tell us the number and the provider. We’ll tell you what we would expect to take off it.