Azure Without the Budget Blowouts
Most Dutch organisations that moved to Azure 2–3 years ago are now spending 2–4× what they should be. Poorly structured data lakes, always-on dev resources, and lack of governance burn through cloud budgets silently. We audit, restructure, and optimise.
Where the money is being wasted
After auditing dozens of Azure environments across Dutch enterprises, these six patterns account for over 80% of avoidable cloud spend.
Uncompressed, unpartitioned data lakes
Teams dump CSV files into Azure Data Lake with no partitioning strategy. A 10 TB raw data lake often compresses to under 1 TB with Parquet + Snappy. Most organisations overpay by 5–10× on storage costs alone.
Typical saving: 60–80% on storageAlways-on development resources
Dev and test Azure SQL databases, Databricks clusters, and AKS nodes running 24/7 when they are used for 6–8 hours per working day. Auto-pause and schedule-based shutdown on non-production workloads cuts compute costs dramatically.
Typical saving: 40–70% on dev computeOverprovisioned reserved instances
Reserved instances purchased for last year's workload profile. Current workloads use a fraction of reserved capacity, but the commitment remains. Regular right-sizing sessions and flexible reserved instance exchanges solve this.
Typical saving: 20–40% on reserved computeUnmanaged data egress
Data copied between Azure regions, from Azure to on-premises, or sent to external vendors generates egress costs that multiply silently. Architecture changes and caching layers eliminate most egress charges.
Typical saving: 50–90% on egress costsRedundant pipeline runs
Data Factory and Synapse pipelines running on fixed schedules regardless of whether source data has changed. Event-driven triggers and watermark-based incremental loads eliminate unnecessary pipeline compute.
Typical saving: 30–50% on pipeline computeNo tagging or cost allocation
Without resource tagging, cost spikes are invisible until the monthly invoice arrives. Tagging strategy plus Azure Cost Management alerts mean you catch issues in hours, not weeks.
Typical saving: eliminates billing surprisesInfrastructure as Code: stop clicking, start governing
Manually provisioned Azure resources are the root cause of most governance and cost problems. When anyone can create a resource with a few clicks, you end up with untagged resources in wrong regions, overprovisioned SKUs, and no audit trail.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with Bicep or Terraform solves this. Every resource is defined in version-controlled code, reviewed in pull requests, and deployed through a CI/CD pipeline. No resource can exist that is not in the code — and if it does, policy enforcement removes it automatically.
We migrate existing ad hoc Azure environments to IaC without downtime, and establish the governance guardrails that prevent future drift.
Azure Landing Zones: the foundation that scales
An Azure Landing Zone is a pre-configured, policy-governed subscription environment that enforces security, cost, and compliance baselines before any workload is deployed. It is not a product — it is an architecture pattern that prevents the governance debt that accumulates in DIY cloud environments.
Centralised Azure AD, managed identities, and least-privilege RBAC. No service principals with subscription-level owner rights.
Hub-spoke network architecture with private endpoints. Data never traverses the public internet inside your Azure estate.
Policy-as-code enforcement of approved regions, SKUs, and security controls. Resources that violate policy cannot be deployed.
Standardised landing zones for data platform, AI workloads, and application hosting — each with pre-configured security baseline.
Azure Cost Optimisation Audit
A three-week engagement that produces a complete picture of where your Azure budget is being wasted and a prioritised, costed remediation plan. Most clients recover the audit fee in the first month of savings.
Typical client saves €8,000–€25,000/month after implementation.
Book the Audit- Complete Azure spend analysis by resource, team, and workload
- Identification of top 10 cost reduction opportunities ranked by impact
- Architecture review for data lake, compute, and networking
- FinOps maturity assessment and roadmap
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) recommendations for repeatable, governed deployment
- Azure Landing Zone design if not already in place
- Remediation plan with effort estimates and expected savings per action
- Executive cost model showing savings over 12 months