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Optimise your Azure costs

Manage your cloud spending and focus on what matters most to your business

Explore tools and resources to help you save

Find out about the tools, offers, and guidance designed to help you manage and optimise your Azure costs. Learn how to understand and forecast your note, optimise workload costs, and control your spending.

Understand and forecast your costs

Cost optimise your workloads

Control your costs

8 ways to optimise costs today

1
Shut down unused resources

Identify idle virtual machines (VMs), ExpressRoute circuits, and other resources with Azure Advisor. Get recommendations on which resources to shut down, and see how much you would save.

2
Right-size underused resources

Find underutilised resources with Azure Advisor—and get recommendations on how to reduce your spend by reconfiguring or consolidating them.

3
Add an Azure savings plan for compute for dynamic workloads

Save up to 65 percent off pay-as-you-go pricing when you commit to spend a fixed hourly amount on compute services for one or three years.

4
Reserve instances for consistent workloads

Get a discount of up to 72 percent over pay-as-you-go pricing on Azure services when you prepay for a one- or three-year term with reservation pricing.

5
Take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit

AWS is up to five times more expensive than Azure for Windows Server and SQL Server. Save when you migrate your on-premises workloads to Azure.

6
Configure autoscaling

Save by dynamically allocating and de-allocating resources to match your performance needs.

7
Choose the right Azure compute service

Azure offers many ways to host your code. Operate more cost efficiently by selecting the right compute service for your application.

8
Set up budgets and allocate costs to teams and projects

Create and manage budgets for the Azure services you use or subscribe to—and monitor your organisation’s cloud spending—with Microsoft Cost Management.

See how customers are optimising their Azure costs

Maersk delivers cost optimisation across its organisation

Global logistics leader Maersk gained significant benefits, like enterprise-wide awareness and better cost management processes, through its on-going digital transformation by making cloud cost optimisation a core practise.

ASOS weaves cost optimisation into fashion innovation

"We spend a lot of money in the cloud, so it's one of those things that has a huge impact. Our cloud cost optimization has already saved us 25 to 40 percent."

Kristina Moln-Page, Head of Finance, ASOS
ASOS

H&R Block optimises cloud costs with Azure

H&R Block partnered with Microsoft to increase the cost efficiency of its cloud deployments. Using Azure cost-optimisation services and best practises, the tax preparation giant continuously optimises its cloud spend and keeps monthly costs under control year-over-year.

H&R Block

Cost optimisation training

Learn how to save money on Azure in this free, 51-minute Microsoft Learn module, Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework—Cost Optimisation. You’ll learn how to:

  • Gain visibility and draw cost insights using monitoring and analytics.
  • Maximise the efficiency of your cloud environment.
  • Provision resources that are optimised for cost.

Additional cost optimisation resources

Get help managing your costs from expert partners

Find help with cost management from an Azure partner with verified capabilities—and move forward confidently, knowing your partner is committed to your success. Depending on your needs, there are two expert partner options to choose from:

Azure advanced specialisation partners provide deep expertise in specific scenarios—such as infrastructure migration, app modernisation, cloud-native app development, or managing specialised workloads on Azure.

Azure expert managed service providers are generalists, offering validated expertise in managing and optimising Azure environments, following industry and Microsoft best practises.

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