CIO Case Story · FinOps

Taming Cloud Sprawl: Cutting Azure Bills by 35% Without Touching a Single Report

How a mid-market manufacturer turned six years of uncontrolled cloud growth into a governed, transparent platform—saving €1.4M annually while preserving every dashboard, pipeline, and SLA the business depends on.

35%

Azure cost reduction

€1.4M

Annual savings reinvested

User-facing reports affected

Azure FinOps Cockpit

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Monthly Spend: Where the Savings Came From

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€332K

Baseline

−€52K

Right-sizing

−€38K

Reservations

−€18K

Storage tiers

−€8K

Orphan cleanup

€216K

After 6 mo.

Baseline: €332K / month

Starting point before FinOps program. 14 subscriptions, 60% of spend accounted for. Annualized: €3.98M.

Resources by Business Owner

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100%

Tagged

14 → 6

Subscriptions

€0

Unallocated

OWNED

BI & Analytics

€78K

OWNED

Data Science

€54K

Mfg. IoT

€32K

Finance

€28K

Supply Ch.

€14K

€10K

BI & Analytics

Data Science

Manufacturing

Finance / HR

Monthly Azure Spend Trajectory

€216K

↓ €116K vs. baseline · 35%

M0M1M2M3M4M5M6

M1 Tagging taxonomy enforced via Azure Policy

M3 Reserved Instances and Savings Plans activated

M6 FinOps cadence handed over to internal IT team

📋 Strategic Blueprint Based on Real-World Scenarios

This case story illustrates a common challenge facing IT leaders managing maturing Azure environments. The architecture and savings model reflect our proven FinOps approach. Wondering where your cloud budget actually goes? Let’s run a Cloud Cost Diagnostic →

The Challenge

Six Years of “Just Spin It Up” Caught Up With IT

The CIO of a European industrial manufacturer inherited an Azure tenant that had grown organically since 2019. Every BI initiative, every data science experiment, every “quick” integration had been spun up under whichever team had budget at the time. No tagging strategy, no central FinOps function, no single owner for cloud cost.

The result: 14 subscriptions, three resource group conventions, idle Synapse pools running 24/7, premium-tier storage holding data nobody had queried in two years, and a Databricks cluster that nobody could trace back to a business owner. The Azure bill had grown 280% over four years while data volume grew only 90%.

The CFO wanted answers. The CIO needed a plan that wouldn’t break a single production dashboard.

The Breaking Point

The trigger arrived in a single Monday-morning email from the CFO: “The board is asking why our cloud bill is now larger than our entire on-prem datacenter cost from 2020. I need a written explanation by Friday.”

The IT Director pulled the Azure Cost Management exports. After two days of analysis, they could account for roughly 60% of the spend. The remaining 40%—approximately €1.6M annualized—was attributed to “unallocated” or “shared services,” with no clear owner, no business justification, and no documented growth driver.

Project Approach

FinOps Without the Theater: Measure, Right-Size, Govern

We approached the engagement as a diagnostic-first FinOps program, not a re-platforming project. The rule was simple: every change had to be invisible to the business. No retired reports, no broken pipelines, no “we’ll fix it later.” The CIO needed savings the CFO could defend on a board slide, and the business needed continuity.

1. Cost Visibility Foundation

Deployed a tagging taxonomy across all 14 subscriptions, built a Power BI cost cockpit on top of Azure Cost Management exports, and assigned every resource to a business owner. For the first time, every euro had a name.

2. Right-Sizing & Reservations

Audited Synapse SQL pools, Databricks clusters, and VM sizes against actual usage. Switched 70% of stable workloads to Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Autoscaling and auto-pause were enabled on every dev/test environment.

3. Storage Tiering & Lifecycle

Moved 84TB of rarely-accessed data from Hot to Cool and Archive tiers via Azure Storage lifecycle policies. Decommissioned three orphaned SQL databases and one Synapse dedicated pool that no dashboard queried.

4. Governance Guardrails

Implemented Azure Policy to prevent untagged resource creation, budget alerts per business unit, and a monthly FinOps review cadence. The cost cockpit became the IT Director’s standing agenda item with the CFO.

The Technology Stack

A FinOps program is only as good as the data feeding it. We used native Azure tooling combined with Power BI to give IT leadership a single, defensible view of cloud economics.

Cost Intelligence

Azure Cost Management exports, Power BI cost cockpit with anomaly detection

Governance & Policy

Azure Policy, Management Groups, mandatory tagging, budget alerts per business unit

Workload Optimization

Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, Synapse auto-pause, Databricks pool tuning

Storage Lifecycle

Azure Storage tiering (Hot/Cool/Archive), lifecycle management policies, orphan detection

Project Outcomes

Measurable Savings, Zero Business Disruption

35% Azure cost reduction in 6 months

100% of resources tagged and owned

Zero production reports affected

Predictable budget per business unit

“Cloud cost sprawl isn’t a technology problem—it’s a visibility and accountability problem. When every resource has an owner and every owner sees their bill, the ‘right-sizing’ conversation happens organically. Our job is to build the cockpit and the guardrails. The savings follow.”

Justyna

PMO Manager, Multishoring

Summary

From Cloud Liability to Cloud Discipline

What started as a defensive exercise—explaining the bill to the board—became a permanent operating capability. The manufacturer now runs a monthly FinOps review, every new Azure resource is born with a tag and an owner, and the IT Director walks into budget conversations with hard data instead of estimates.

The €1.4M in annual savings is being reinvested into a new Databricks-based predictive maintenance program. The board got its answer. The CIO got a defensible cloud strategy. And not a single user noticed.

contact

Thank you for your interest in Multishoring.

We’d like to ask you a few questions to better understand your IT needs.

Justyna PMO Manager

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