Azure is a powerful platform for managing your enterprise cloud resources. While you can use the self-serve portal to configure and modify Azure resources, it’s often more effective to work with a professional partner who has experience optimizing costs to help you achieve your goals. In this post, we’ll share some best practices and strategies for optimizing costs when working with Azure Managed Services.

Rightsizing Resources: Matching Performance to Actual Needs

One of the most common ways that organizations can optimize their costs is by rightsizing their resources. Rightsizing involves reducing the size of your resource pool, which will reduce overall costs.

Rightsizing can be done manually or automatically, depending on your needs and preferences. Manual rightsizing involves identifying and removing unused resources from an existing pool; this can be done at the database level (e.g., reducing database instances), compute level (e.g., removing virtual machines), storage level (e.g., deleting files) or network level (e.g., deleting networks). Auto-configuration of entitlements happens implicitly as you add new workloads or scale existing ones; it’s similar in concept to manually sizing entitlements, but requires fewer steps on your part because it happens automatically based on certain criteria, rather than being triggered manually as needed by an administrator who knows where all these things sit in the Azure Managed Services architecture.”

Optimizing Storage Costs: Smart Strategies for Data Management

Azure Data Box is a cost-effective solution for archiving data. It provides storage, bandwidth, and processing power that you can use to ingest and process large volumes of unstructured data. You can use Azure Data Box as an offsite backup destination or for disaster recovery purposes by integrating it with your on-premises infrastructure.

Azure Backup allows you to back up your workloads running on Windows Server or Linux VMs in Azure at scale while reducing the time required for backups by using incremental backups and maintaining point-in-time consistency across multiple backups. You can also restore individual files from any backup point without having to restore entire VMs or databases; this helps reduce downtime caused by unplanned outages such as hardware failures, software bugs, etc., which often result in significant loss of productivity due to lengthy recovery processes taking hours/days depending upon nature of the failure.”

Educating Teams on Cost Awareness: Fostering a Culture of Optimizing Costs

The first step to optimizing costs is educating your teams on the importance of cost awareness. Teams need to be aware of the cost of their services, data, and applications so they can make informed decisions about how they use them. Regularly reviewing actual costs vs. budgeted costs will help you optimize your spending.

Teams should also regularly review options using Azure cost estimators and calculators (such as the Azure Cost Estimator) for each service or application being used; this will help identify areas where proven savings can be achieved by switching from one service or application type to another with comparable features but lower costs (for example moving from a virtual machine-based solution such as Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition VMs running SQL Server 2014 Standard Edition databases hosted on an elastic scale compute plan).

Regular Cost Reviews and Adjustments: Iterative Optimization

The most important thing to keep in mind when optimizing costs is that you should never wait until the end of the month or year to review them. It’s easy for businesses to get caught up in their daily operations and forget about something as seemingly mundane as their cloud spend, but this can be very costly in the long run. Regularly checking your Azure costs will help ensure that nothing gets out of hand – and if something does go wrong, then it’ll be easier for you to catch it before things get out of control.

A good way to keep tabs on how much money is going out each month is by creating an Excel spreadsheet with all of your bills (including those from third-party vendors) listed on one sheet, along with columns for each itemized service purchased through Azure–for example: “Storage,” “SQL Database,” etc. – and another column where users enter their estimates for future usage based on projected growth rates over time (like 2% per quarter). This gives everyone involved with managing budgets at various levels within an organization access to real-time data about how much money we’re spending on cloud services every month without having access rights set too high so they can only view certain parts.”

Conclusion on Optimizing Costs

Azure Managed Services is a powerful tool that can help you with optimizing costs and saving money. To make the most of this service, we recommend implementing some or all of the strategies outlined above. For example, if your business has high storage needs but only occasional spikes in compute power usage (for example), consider using Azure Managed Services to optimize those resources instead of buying hardware or software licenses onsite. This not only saves money but also gives you access to new features like backup/restore capabilities which would otherwise be unavailable without managing all these services yourself!