Cost Optimisation Reviews: Getting Better Value from Cloud
Cloud cost optimisation reviews systematically analyse your cloud spending to identify inefficiencies, opportunities for savings, and misaligned architecture decisions that are driving unnecessary cost. For most organisations, a thorough review identifies 20-40% potential savings without compromising performance or reliability.
What a Cost Optimisation Review Covers
- Right-sizing: Compare instance CPU and memory utilisation against provisioned capacity. Instances running below 20% average utilisation are over-provisioned.
- Idle resources: Identify stopped EC2 instances, unattached EBS volumes, unused Elastic IPs, idle load balancers, and forgotten snapshots
- Reservation coverage: What percentage of stable compute is covered by reservations or savings plans? Uncovered stable workloads are a savings opportunity.
- Data transfer costs: Identify unexpected egress patterns — cross-region data transfer, inter-AZ traffic, direct internet egress
- Storage lifecycle: Old objects in S3 without lifecycle policies. Data that could be moved to Glacier/cheaper tiers.
- Managed service right-sizing: RDS instance size, ElastiCache node count, OpenSearch instance type
Tagging for Cost Visibility
Cost optimisation is impossible without attribution. Every resource must be tagged with environment (production/staging/dev), project, team, and cost centre. Untagged resources cannot be attributed to a business owner and accumulate as unmanaged cost.
Review Frequency
We recommend quarterly cost optimisation reviews for organisations spending >£1,000/month on cloud infrastructure — the effort pays for itself rapidly. We include this in retainer engagements and offer it as a standalone service.