One of Core’s customers in the banking industry, who would prefer to remain anonymous for data protection and security purposes, already had a relationship with Core through the delivery of managed and professional services in Dynamics 365 and CSP Licensing. For the purpose of this case study, we’ll refer to them as Company B.  

After Company B’s Azure costs scaled rapidly in 2022 without a clear understanding of the cause, they were asked if they would like to take advantage of Core’s new offering, the Azure Technical Assessment and Cost Optimisation review (the Azure TACO), to help regain control of their cloud spend and reduce costs. 

Following the pandemic, Company B now operates on a hybrid working model, with one office, and employees home-based all over the UK; serving clients all across the world. By onboarding Company B to Core’s Azure Managed Service starting with the Azure TACO review, Core was able to help Company B reduce their monthly Azure bill by 50%.

Due to their budget processes and a strong emphasis on responsible spending, it was imperative for Company B to ensure that costs were necessary and controlled, in a way that made effective use of the organisation’s funding. 

The choice to leverage the Azure Cloud platform was made to align seamlessly with their hybrid working model, and make sure systems and services were accessible from anywhere 24x7. Company B had recently moved their Dynamics 365 platform from On-Premises to Online, alongside a range of other business systems and workloads which had become costly and ineffective to host on-premises. On-premises alternatives would have doubled their costs, so an entire infrastructure review took place.

Whilst Core was already providing some monitoring, updates and patching services for Company B’s Azure subscription, the new Azure Managed Service meant that in addition to these tasks, Company B received a service that included cost, specification, and security optimisation. This took the form of scheduled and reactive tasks which contributed to regular consumable reports which provided clear and consistent insights into the Azure subscription.

From these reports, Company B’s team received clear summaries of what was happening in their subscription, including server patch status, application version updates, security recommendations, resource usage analysis, costs broken down into service family groups (E.g. Compute, Storage, Network) and trends compared across previous months. This provided a comprehensive view of the subscription, in addition to monthly recommendations for optimisation, security improvements and projected savings. Optimisations could include right-sizing server specifications, autoscaling and sleeping resources to reflect out of hours service levels, or utilising pre-paid reservations instead of pay as you go pricing.

The Azure team at Core made suggestions for annual/multi-year commitments to licensing and compute infrastructure which helped Company B reduce costs over the same period when compared to Pay as You Go pricing.

By implementing the Core Azure Managed Service and actioning recommendations from the Azure TACO, Company B’s costs have been reduced by almost 50%, from over £6,000 per month, to £3,500 per month. This enabled Company B’s IT team to stop the overspend and bring Azure costs back within budget.

Whilst some of these tasks could have been completed by Company B team members, familiarity with the configuration and management of Azure management and costs analysis are scarce. Furthermore, while these optimisation tasks need to be undertaken regularly to remain in control of Azure spend, your teams can be impacted during busy periods, other projects, or staff shortages. Knowing they have access to a service backed by SLA and delivered by a team of Azure experts who are constantly gathering the information needed and sharing it in an easy to consume format, makes the process efficient, straightforward and robust.