Azure Cost Optimisation

Is Your Azure Bill Going Up and Nobody Can Say Why?

We carry out an independent review of your Azure environment, find out exactly where the money is going, and fix what's driving the cost up. Most businesses we review are paying for resources they don't need, at prices they don't have to pay.

Independent review · From £375, depending on the size of your tenant · We only need read-only access to look

What Is Azure Cost Optimisation?

Azure cost optimisation is the process of reviewing a Microsoft Azure environment to find and remove spend that isn't delivering any value — oversized virtual machines, pay-as-you-go pricing on workloads that should be reserved, unused storage and networking resources, and licensing that isn't being used efficiently — then right-sizing, reconfiguring or removing them without affecting how the systems actually perform.

It's an independent, read-only review, not a migration or a change of supplier. It sits alongside whoever manages your IT day to day, Arrival or not, and simply asks: is this bill actually right?

Why Azure Bills Keep Creeping Up

We hear the same thing on calls most weeks: someone opens their Azure invoice, the number has crept up again, and nobody in the business can quite explain why. It's rarely one big mistake. It's usually a slow build-up of small ones — and it's a widespread problem, not just yours. Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud Report found that 29% of cloud spend now delivers no value at all, the first rise in wasted cloud spend in five years, driven largely by environments nobody's had time to go back and tidy up.

Nobody's watching the bill

Azure was set up by an IT person, a previous provider, or a developer who left. The environment has grown since, but nobody's job is to keep an eye on what it's actually costing.

Resources sized for "just in case"

Virtual machines get provisioned bigger than they need to be "to be safe", and nobody ever goes back to right-size them once real usage is known.

Pay-as-you-go, permanently

Workloads that have been running for years are often still on full pay-as-you-go pricing, when a reservation or savings plan could cut that same spend by a third or more.

Forgotten resources still billing

Old test servers, unattached disks, unused public IP addresses and stale snapshots from a project that finished months ago — all quietly still on the invoice.

Wrong storage tier

Data that's barely touched sits on expensive, fast storage designed for active workloads, when a cooler (and much cheaper) tier would do the same job.

No one owns cost allocation

Without proper tagging, it's impossible to tell which department, project or client a given cost belongs to — so nobody can be held accountable for it, and nobody questions it.

Source: Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report

How The Review Works

Straightforward, and it doesn't touch anything live. We look, we report, you decide what happens next.

1

Short scoping call

15–20 minutes to understand your Azure setup — how many subscriptions, what's running, and what's prompting the review. This tells us how big a job it is and what it'll cost.

2

Read-only access

We ask for a Cost Management Reader role on your tenant — enough to see everything we need, with no ability to change or delete anything. Nothing in your environment is touched during the review itself.

3

The audit

We go through your subscriptions line by line: compute, storage, networking, databases, licensing and unused resources, comparing what you're running against what you actually need.

4

A report you can actually read

A plain-English summary of what we found, a prioritised list of changes ranked by how much they'll save versus how much effort or risk is involved, and a total estimated saving.

5

Walk-through call

We talk you through the findings, answer questions, and agree what happens next. You can implement the changes yourselves, have your existing IT provider do it, or have us do it for you.

What We Actually Check

Every review covers the same ground, whether you're running a handful of servers or a full multi-subscription estate:

Compute right-sizing

Are your virtual machines the right size for what they actually do, based on real usage data rather than guesswork?

Reservations & savings plans

Which stable, long-running workloads should move off pay-as-you-go pricing onto a Reserved Instance or Savings Plan?

Licensing (Hybrid Benefit)

Are you already paying for Windows Server or SQL Server licences elsewhere that could be reused in Azure to cut the compute cost?

Storage tiering

Is infrequently accessed data sitting on premium storage when a cooler, cheaper tier would do the same job?

Orphaned resources

Unattached disks, unused public IPs, old snapshots, idle load balancers and other resources still quietly billing for nothing.

Scheduling & autoscaling

Do non-production environments run 24/7 when they're only used in office hours? Could workloads scale down automatically overnight?

Tagging & cost allocation

Can costs be traced back to a department, project or client, so spend is visible and someone is accountable for it?

Governance & budgets

Are budgets and alerts in place so a spike gets caught in days, not discovered three months later on an invoice?

Who This Is For

Businesses running production workloads in Azure who've noticed the bill creeping up and want an honest, independent second opinion — whether Arrival manages your IT already or not. It's especially useful if you inherited your Azure environment from a previous provider or an employee who's since left, and nobody currently in the business fully understands what's actually running or why.

It's also a sensible check even if your bill feels "about right". Most environments we've looked at were paying for more than they needed — the businesses just didn't know, because nobody had ever gone looking.

As a Microsoft Partner, we already work inside Azure and Microsoft 365 environments every day — this review sits alongside that experience, or stands entirely on its own if you'd rather keep it separate from your day-to-day IT support.

What Does It Cost?

From £375 +VAT

Depending on the size and complexity of your Azure tenant

A single-subscription SMB environment sits at the lower end; larger, multi-subscription or Enterprise Agreement estates cost more simply because there's more to go through. You'll get an exact, fixed price after a short scoping call — free, no obligation, and no pressure either way. If you'd like the changes made for you rather than doing it in-house, that's quoted separately once you've seen the findings and know exactly what's involved.

Common Questions

Will this cause any downtime or disruption?

No. The audit itself is entirely read-only — we're looking at billing data, resource configuration and usage metrics, not changing anything. Any changes that come out of the report only happen if and when you decide to make them, and we'll always talk through the risk and timing of each one first.

What access do you need to our Azure tenant?

Just a Cost Management Reader role for the audit — enough to see cost data, resource configuration and usage, with no ability to change or delete anything. If you go ahead with implementation afterwards, we'll agree exactly what level of access that needs at the time.

How much could we actually save?

It depends entirely on your environment — we won't put a number on it before we've actually looked. What we can say is that in most reviews we've done, there's been a meaningful saving available, sometimes considerable, usually from a combination of right-sizing, reservations, licensing and cleaning up resources nobody's using any more.

We already have an IT provider or cloud consultant — is that a problem?

Not at all. This is designed to be an independent second opinion, not a replacement for whoever manages your Azure day to day. You're welcome to take the report straight to them and have them make the changes.

How long does the review take?

Typically one to two weeks from the scoping call to the finished report, depending on the size of your environment and how quickly access is granted.

Do you only work with Microsoft-managed businesses?

No — you don't need to be an existing Arrival client. We do this as a standalone, independent service specifically because so many businesses have told us they wanted a second opinion they could trust.

Does the review cover AI and Copilot workloads?

Yes. AI-related workloads are one of the fastest-growing sources of cloud waste right now — unpredictable usage patterns make them easy to over-provision and hard to forecast. If you're running AI services, Copilot licensing or GPU-backed compute in Azure, that's included in the review.

How is this different to Microsoft's own Azure Advisor recommendations?

Azure Advisor is a useful starting point, but it only ever looks at one subscription in isolation and tends to flag the obvious, low-risk items. Our review looks across your whole tenant, weighs each recommendation against your actual usage and business context, and tells you which changes are genuinely worth making first.

Find Out Where Your Azure Spend Is Really Going

Book a free, no-obligation scoping call. If we don't think a full review is worth your money, we'll tell you that too.

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