FinOps for Microsoft Azure

Optimize your costs and accelerate your cloud transformation with FinOps for Microsoft Azure. This allows you to exploit the full potential of Microsoft Azure without breaking your budget. But what is FinOps actually about?

FinOps (Financial Operations) is an innovative approach that brings finance, technology and business together to optimize costs in the cloud while maximizing business value. With FinOps for Microsoft Azure, you gain control over your cloud spend while accelerating your digital transformation.

As an experienced Microsoft Solutions Partner, we assist you in optimizing your Microsoft Cloud infrastructure.

Our proven FinOps approach includes:

1. "Pay Less" rate optimization: This includes the optimization of 1- or 3-year discount programs as well as the analysis of your spend patterns and willingness to commit. Resulting in a customized strategy to get the most out of discounts.
2. “Use Less” eliminate unnecessary waste: This includes deleting unused resources such as orphaned hard disks, snapshots, etc., downsizing VMs that are too large, consolidating databases, best practices for platform services and optimizing object storage classes.
3. Enablement: This includes transferring knowledge about important levers for optimizing cloud spend, KPIs and procedures for optimal control as well as best practices for internal collaboration between central IT and application managers.
4. Implementation planning: This includes an Exec Summary with recommendations, structured discussion of individual measures and assignment of responsibilities.
5. FinOps organizational consulting: Advice on possible courses of action with regard to organization, IT guidelines, tagging and tooling.

FinOps success stories

The following use cases from our customers clearly show that a FinOps checkup with PCG and the introduction of FinOps in the company offers many advantages.

Use Case 1: Unused resources

At an industrial company with >5 years of cloud usage, hundreds of unnecessary snapshots and dozens of unused hard disks were found using scripts. As a result, savings of >4,000 EUR/month were achieved (~50,000 EUR p.a.).

Use Case 2: Unmanaged discount programs

At a digital service provider with >5 years of cloud usage, discount programs were not optimally interlinked with usage in product development. Annual savings potential of approx. 80,000 EUR p.a.

Use case 3: Overprovisioned VMs

Internal customers were provided with more resources than required in the medium-sized group. One third of the savings potential of EUR 8,000/month could be realized in the short term (~EUR 25,000 p.a.).

FinOps using AMD as a concrete example

When companies migrate to the cloud, the first step is usually to set up virtual machines (VMs) to run workloads on the selected cloud platform. And the key to optimizing compute costs is to evaluate the price/performance ratio.

Choose the right CPU for your VM

You have the freedom to choose which type of physical CPU runs your cloud workload. Making this decision can have a measurable impact on performance and cost. By selecting a CPU with a lower price/performance ratio, you can realize immediate cost efficiencies.

For example, C3D VMs powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors deliver up to 45% better performance and improved performance consistency over previous N2D VMs, with up to 360 vCPUs and 2.8 TB of memory per VM.

In addition, running your workload on a more powerful CPU can reduce runtime and therefore save on ongoing computing costs. When evaluating VM types, it is important to ensure that the underlying CPU matches your workload requirements.

We can help you find a flexible solution with a comprehensive feature set that balances customization, performance and total cost of ownership (TCO).

By switching from N2D to C3D, general VM customers can save an average of 26% on their VM operating costs (across five typical workload benchmarks), reducing their overall cloud spend or opening up the IT budget for high-demand features such as Data & AI Services.