What a $2M Azure Bill Really Tells You About Governance
- The InfraEdge
- Jun 18
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 13
The InfraEdge | CloudLattice Publication
This article explains how enterprises facing high Azure costs can regain control by implementing disciplined Reserved Instance governance—through automation, quarterly reviews, and cross-functional alignment—to eliminate waste and improve financial predictability.
If you are already using Microsoft Azure to host computing infrastructure, this article may be of help. This is with the assumption that you do not have capacity within your environment to host your own workloads, or there is a net benefit regarding savings on Microsoft licensing.
Enterprise cloud spend can grow faster than cloud discipline. And when an Azure bill crosses into seven-figure territory, it usually prompts a flurry of activity: budget reviews, executive meetings, maybe even a temporary hiring freeze.
A $2M Azure bill is not just a wake-up call—it is a signal. Not of overspending, necessarily. But of under-governance.
You Can not Buy Your Way to Efficiency
Microsoft offers generous discounts through Azure Reservations, which allow customers to pre-commit to specific VM types or services for one- or three-year terms. These can reduce compute costs by up to 72%. But many large companies leave this opportunity untapped or poorly optimized.
Why? Because without the right governance practices in place, Reserved Instances are hard to manage well.
We see it all the time:
RIs are purchased based on last year’s peak usage rather than forecasted demand.
Subscriptions proliferate across departments, making it difficult to share RI benefits.
Engineering teams scale workloads dynamically, unaware of the impact on RI utilization.
Nobody owns a quarterly review process to catch underused reservations.
When these signals are missed, costs are not just high—they are imprecise.
What the Azure Bill Does not Show You
A $2M Azure bill can be loud—but it does not always say what matters most.
It will not tell you that nearly a fifth of your Reserved Instance capacity sat unused last quarter.
It will not flag that your biggest cost centers are running in subscriptions with zero RI coverage.
It will not mention that dev and test environments are burning money overnight, even when nobody is using them.
And it certainly will not point out how regional sprawl is quietly undermining your shared scopes. These are not dramatic failures—they are the kind of small misalignments that add up over time. But left unchecked, they can cost more than even your most expensive VMs. Having infrastructure in various regions can be a net benefit when properly architected and managed, managing availability and costs is something to take into consideration.
Want to Cut Your Azure Spend by 30–50%?
Download our Reserved Instance Optimization Playbook and discover proven strategies Fortune 500 teams use to unlock hidden savings.
Governance Is not Just Policy—It is Rhythm
At CloudLattice, we think of governance as a cadence, not a control. The best cost outcomes come from repeatable processes:
Quarterly RI reviews to detect underutilization, scope drift, and optimization opportunities
Automated dashboards using Azure Resource Graph and Cost Management APIs
Shared scope planning to ensure reservations can be consumed across business units
Role clarity across engineering, finance, and procurement
These are not heavy processes. They are just deliberate ones.
How We Help
CloudLattice delivers RI governance as a managed service. We:
Conduct baseline utilization audits
Configure alerts and visualizations to track reservation performance
Facilitate regular checkpoints to rebalance and refine RI coverage
Translate cloud cost anomalies into clear, executive-ready insights
CloudLattice LLC can help you turn cloud cost chaos into clarity.
The practices, frameworks, and examples described in this publication reflect the expertise and methodology developed by CloudLattice. While these services have not yet been implemented under the CloudLattice brand, they are grounded in years of hands-on experience in enterprise cloud architecture, automation, and governance. We are actively engaging with forward-thinking organizations ready to apply these models.
About CloudLattice
CloudLattice empowers enterprise finance and technology leaders to scale governance across Microsoft Azure, and hybrid computing infrastructure. Led by Stuart Goings, we deliver hands-on implementation of policy automation, FinOps best practices, and cross-cloud reporting designed to reduce chaos and improve control.
Led by enterprise cloud computing consultant Stuart Goings, CloudLattice solutions that scale with complexity — and make governance practical again.
A Note on Trust:
The practices, frameworks, and examples described in this publication reflect the expertise and methodology developed by CloudLattice. While these services have not yet been implemented under the CloudLattice brand, they are grounded in years of hands-on experience in enterprise cloud architecture, automation, and governance. We are engaging with forward-thinking organizations ready to apply these solutions.
