Valto Talks #2 — Where Azure spend really goes

Dougie Wood: Alex, every client tells us Azure costs more than they expected. Is that just cloud, or is something else going on?

Alex Karolemeas: It is rarely the compute. It is almost always three things: environments nobody turned off, storage tiers nobody reviewed, and egress nobody modelled.

Dougie Wood: Environments nobody turned off — dev and test?

Alex Karolemeas: Dev, test, and the proof of concept from eighteen months ago that quietly became production-adjacent. We find those on almost every assessment. Auto-shutdown on non-production compute is the single highest-return change we make, and it takes an afternoon.

Dougie Wood: And storage?

Alex Karolemeas: Everything lands on hot and stays there. Lifecycle policies move it down as it ages. That is not a difficult change, it is just one nobody owns.

Dougie Wood: You mentioned governance rather than cost-cutting.

Alex Karolemeas: Because cutting is a one-off and governance is a habit. Tag everything to an owner, put budgets and alerts on subscriptions, and review monthly. Otherwise you do the exercise, save thirty per cent, and give it all back within a year.

Dougie Wood: What should someone do first, this week?

Alex Karolemeas: Open Cost Analysis, group by resource group, and sort descending. The answer is usually in the top five lines, and it is usually something someone forgot about.