3rd Party: A Microsoft Support Show – Azure Storage Cost Optimization (ep5).

We have a couple of different offerings that are around that. No one wants to pay too much for anything, right? That’s why there’s garage sales and bargains and eBay’s—people want to get the same product and service for cheaper. But there aren’t a lot of licensing reviews that happen with major organizations. So, if you’re buying something from a cloud provider, they’re not really incentivized to tell you you’re paying too much or you have too many things.

We have two different offerings. One of them is around M365, and that is a licensing review. And we will go through and see: are you right-sized? And a lot of organizations are not as applicable to everybody having an E3 which has email and all these other things, when they might have frontline workers that simply don’t do email—they don’t need it for their job.

It’s not part of the requirements [for completing their job]. They might just be able to log into a machine and stamp out some parts, [for example], but they don’t need a full license for everything else in the organization. So we’ve helped! One of the best ones we did was $1.3 million in licenses annually taken off right off the bat. They just returned to Microsoft and said, we don’t need these [licenses] anymore. That was pretty impactful from a licensing standpoint. It doesn’t take that long to go through it.

The other [service] that we do for cost saving is an Azure Excellence bundle. That one is really exciting. What we do with the Azure Excellence Bundle is go through the Azure infrastructure. It doesn’t matter how many subscriptions you have inside your tenant.

We can do as many or as little as you want. We had a customer that had 81. Of those, there were 28 that were garbage. They were free subscriptions, MSDN, pay as you go. And they weren’t really part of the corporate organization, but they were part of the Microsoft cloud infrastructure. So we limit that down to the 51, bundle it together, and then we help PMO that process.

So, from a project management standpoint, we help implement changes with that customer. In a large organization there can be millions and millions of objects out there in the cloud. We will look at the ones that are easy to fix and save the most money and start from that category. Our average customer saves about 20 to 30% (close to usually 30%) of their annual spend in an eight-week period. They will save it.

We’ve seen multiple customers over a quarter million dollars. The one we just did last week was really, really good. They were in the United Kingdom, so they saved over 100,000 pounds a month with our suggestions. In the eight-week period. That’s about 1.6 million USD a year. That was taken right off the bottom line.

There’s a lot of sprawl in Azure. The other thing is that, [like a closet,] you put things into your closet, and you never go look in the closet again. Right. And you open it up and ask, “How is this so full?”

And you just want to put one more thing in there, but you don’t realize the things of the back are dead. They’re useless. They don’t fit anymore. Or there are the kids boots that they’ve outgrown. Or they may not even live in the house anymore! And there’s so many things in the closet. We help go through the [Azure] closet.

So we give scripts [to our customers]. We give them processes so they can clean out the closet of stuff that they had [on Azure]. They were still accumulating, in this case, in the cloud, they’re still paying on them. Those “boots” had a monthly cost. So we get rid of all those things. We say, “Let’s clean it all out so you’re able to see the closet.”

You might say, “We’re going to add new things as we go along because we’re growing as an organization.” But you’ll need to get rid of the dust and do some spring cleaning along the way. We help [you] do that process.

The other thing that we do is help from a sustainable standpoint. We do our Azure Excellence subscription bundle.

Everyone everyone’s aware that people buy gym memberships and brag about them and never go, right? What we do is we help them be the personal trainer and do monthly sessions to do follow up to make sure that they’re doing arms and they’re doing their abs and they’re doing their legs.

We make sure they’re not skipping leg day, that they’re actually going to the “gym.” That’s what a personal trainer would do. We do that for their Azure cost optimization.

[There was a situation] we had with one customer through which they were paying $131,000 [for Azure]  annually. The actual usage on that line was $0.56.

Absolutely. It’s not uncommon for them in the eight-week engagement that [their 30% service savings] will pay for that engagement and the whole year of all US Cloud spend. Not just what we’re talking about for Azure, but also their proactive services spend and their consulting services spend.

They had projects, initiatives and other things, but all that can be covered and then some—just from the savings alone. That’s happened with multiple clients so far.

Yeah, it really is. I think it’s [amazing], saving $1.6 million a year, so that an organization within an eight-week period can say, “we now have an extra $1.6 million.”

[With that amount of money saved on Azure,] you can do a lot more in the organization. You can hire some more people. You could do community outreach. There are so many different things you can do with that money and time instead of giving it to Microsoft.