Cloud Cost Optimization Best Practices

As organisations broaden their cloud capabilities, the demand for intelligent and strategic cost management has reached new heights. While Azure offers remarkable agility and flexibility, it can swiftly turn into an expensive liability if not monitored carefully. Approaching 2025, optimising cloud expenditure isn’t solely the concern of the finance department; it’s a shared responsibility among DevOps, developers, engineering managers, and business leaders.

Our internal analyses from client discussions reveal that roughly 30% of cloud expenditure is wasted on underutilised resources, lack of visibility, and excessive provisioning. The encouraging news? Most of this waste can be prevented. By employing a practical checklist and the right tools, you can significantly lower your cloud costs without hindering your delivery or pace of innovation.

1. Establish Ownership from the Start

A crucial yet commonly overlooked aspect of cloud cost management is assigning ownership. When nobody claims responsibility for expenses, accountability diminishes. Each subscription, application, and resource group should have a designated owner.

Implement tagging like owner:devteam-a or env:prod, enabling meaningful data segmentation. To prevent finger-pointing during billing reviews, consider establishing a chargeback or showback model. Turbo360 assists in building this accountability framework by making financial data visible by team, application, or region. For a detailed exploration, check out our blog on Cost Governance in Azure.

2. Optimise Your Tagging Strategy

This may sound familiar, but it’s worth reiterating: without proper tagging, you’re unable to track effectively. If your Azure resources lack appropriate tags, reviewing costs becomes a challenge.

Your tags should reflect the essentials: environment, owner, project, and team. The key challenge is maintaining consistency. You can enforce tagging during resource creation with Azure policies, but it’s easy for people to forget. Turbo360 allows you to audit and rectify tagging gaps automatically, ensuring your cost reports remain clear and actionable. Review our guide on Tagging Best Practices in Azure for streamlining your system.

3. Eliminate Unused Resources

You might be surprised at how many inactive elements occupy your cloud account—old test VMs, unattached disks, obsolete public IPs, and forgotten backups. All these accumulate charges monthly.

Idle resources are prime candidates for cost savings. With Turbo360’s Idle Resource Cleanup module, you can swiftly identify and remove these. Regular cleanup efforts, even every few weeks, can substantially impact your overall expenses. A bonus tip: schedule automatic shutdowns for non-production environments. Why let them run overnight or during weekends?

4. Resize for Savings

Just because you can deploy a high-tier VM or a premium database doesn’t mean you should. Many teams over-provision out of caution and end up paying for capacity they never utilise.

Employ Azure Monitor or the cost-to-performance analysis tools in Turbo360 to identify underused resources. If your VM operates at only 8% CPU throughout the month, you’re overspending. Transition to burstable SKUs or smaller sizes, and consider implementing auto-scaling for workloads with fluctuating demands.

5. Secure Discounts Where Appropriate

If you have services that operate around the clock, such as production databases or backend APIs, these are excellent candidates for Reserved Instances or Azure Savings Plans. You can save up to 60% by committing to one- or three-year terms.

Start small by analysing your usage patterns; perhaps consider a few one-year reservations and extend from there. Turbo360 can help you simulate potential savings before committing, making the decision easier.

6. Automate Routine Tasks

Development and testing environments often remain active outside working hours. It’s akin to leaving all lights on after leaving the office.

Schedule these environments to shut down when not in use. Azure Automation can manage this, but Turbo360 provides more detailed control, offering calendar-based schedules and team-level overrides. A consistent 12-hour daily shutdown could potentially halve your non-production costs.

7. Embrace Serverless or PaaS Solutions

If your workload doesn’t necessitate a virtual machine, don’t use one. Serverless functions, Logic Apps, and Azure App Service can considerably reduce infrastructure costs and alleviate operational burdens.

For nightly batch jobs, consider transitioning to Azure Functions. Hosting smaller web applications? Use App Service or Azure Container Apps. These services auto-scale, charge per execution or runtime, and decrease the need for constant monitoring. Turbo360 recently assisted a customer in lowering Azure Function costs by 45% through monitoring cold starts and execution patterns.

8. Maintain and Optimise Storage

Storage costs can escalate quietly over time, accumulating expenses. Consider old logs, outdated snapshots, and neglected blob containers; every bit adds up.

Conduct regular audits of your storage. Remove unnecessary files, relocate archives to more affordable tiers like Cool or Archive, and automate lifecycle policies. Many teams overlook the substantial savings achieved by shifting infrequently accessed data out of hot tiers.

9. Keep an Eye on Network and Egress Expenses

Costs associated with cross-region data transfer, CDN usage, and ExpressRoute traffic can easily go unnoticed. As your application scales, these expenses can become significant.

Whenever possible, maintain resources within the same region to avoid unnecessary egress costs. Establish private endpoints and ensure proper caching configuration in your CDN. These seemingly minor adjustments can yield major savings when transferring vast amounts of data each month.

10. Create Cost Dashboards and Alerts

You can’t manage what you cannot see. Rather than waiting until the month’s end to review bills, establish dashboards and real-time alerts for cost anomalies.

While Azure Cost Management provides basic dashboards, Turbo360 offers more comprehensive breakdowns by subscription, environment, team, or application. You can monitor budgets, receive alerts for unexpected usage spikes, and even catch untagged resources that suddenly appear.

11. Make FinOps a Collective Responsibility

Optimisation is no longer confined to finance or DevOps; it’s a collaborative endeavour. FinOps involves weaving financial accountability into engineering practices.

Conduct cost workshops, share usage insights with development teams, and incorporate cloud spending into your retrospective reviews. Showback reports provide a constructive way to present this information. When everyone understands how their decisions affect spending, they tend to make more informed choices.

Why Choose Turbo360?

While native tools may suffice for initial phases, growing teams often require something more robust and unified. Turbo360 addresses these needs with intelligent recommendations, automation, and comprehensive visibility, expertly tailored for Azure.

From proactive idle resource detection to refined scheduling options, and from tag enforcement to multi-tenant dashboards, Turbo360 keeps your cloud spending efficient and aligned with your business objectives.

Conclusion

Cloud cost optimisation isn’t a one-off task; it’s an ongoing process. It involves cultivating good habits, adopting tools that minimise manual workload, and engaging every stakeholder.

Whether through rightsizing, automation, or simply assigning ownership, small changes can accumulate over time. Use this checklist as your guiding star, and leverage Turbo360 to solidify your improvements. An optimally managed cloud environment not only speeds up your team’s productivity but also allows your CFO to rest easier.