Most organisations have a monthly Azure cost review. Someone from IT presents the bill. A few line items get questioned. Nobody makes a decision. The meeting ends, the bill gets paid, and the same conversation happens next month.
This is not a cost review — it is a cost report. A report produces acknowledgement. A review produces decisions.
What a Good Cost Review Looks Like
A cost review that produces decisions is structured around business outcomes, not Azure service categories.
The difference in practice: instead of “virtual machines cost £8,400 this month,” the framing is “the customer portal cost £12,000 to run last month, serving 84,000 active sessions — that is £0.14 per session.” One statement invites a question about a category people can’t evaluate; the other invites a question about business value that everyone in the room can.
Who Should Be in the Room
The people in the room determine what decisions are possible. In my experience, replacing IT operations in the chair with the platform architect is the change that makes the most difference.
The Power of Architecture in the Room: I once stepped into a meeting about decommissioning a legacy intranet. The organisation had been dual-running an old private cloud SharePoint environment alongside SharePoint Online for five years. The project was stalled because they needed a backup of the legacy data, but they assumed they needed an expensive, logistically complex site visit to get it. As an architect, I could tell them in thirty seconds: “You have remote access; you can do this from your desk today.” Without that technical context in the meeting, they likely would have continued paying for both environments for another five years.
The Three Pillar Structure
- Total Spend vs. Budget: Is the variance expected? If not, do we have an architectural explanation?
- Cost per Unit of Business Output: (e.g., Cost per order, cost per query, cost per session). This makes spend legible to non-technical stakeholders.
- Reservation Coverage: Surfacing exactly how much stable compute is still on pay-as-you-go pricing because a decision was deferred.
Every review should end with one decision. Not a list of things to investigate, but an action—to commit to a reservation, to scale down a tier, or finally sunset that “zombie” legacy project.
The monthly cost review is the mechanism by which Azure spend becomes a managed business asset rather than an unmanaged liability. If you aren’t making decisions, you’re just reading the news.
Structuring a cost governance process that actually produces decisions is something I help organisations do. Get in touch to talk through your current approach.
