This blog was authored by: Daniel Rickards, Strategic Cloud Consultant | 21 January 2025

When organisations look to optimise cloud costs, they typically focus on rate and usage optimisation. Rate refers to purchasing cloud resources at the lowest rate possible, usually through committed usage discounts. Usage involves changing the way you use cloud resources to take advantage of the pay-as-you go nature of cloud billing.

In reality, there are countless ways to optimise your cloud costs and ensure maximum value from operating on a public cloud platform. This article will explore three commonly forgotten levers of cloud cost optimisation.

1. Cloud Provider Funding Programmes

One commonly overlooked area to lower the cost of building and operating a cloud platform are the numerous funding programmes available from AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). These help organisations extract more value from cloud, whether it’s migrating workloads, designing new architecture patterns or upskilling teams.

Funded Training and Certification

Cloud skills are expensive. According to Morgan McKinley, a specialist recruiter for cloud, the average annual salary for certified Cloud Architects with hands-on experience working in London is approximately £100 K. Bringing in external talent to design, operate and improve a cloud platform can be prohibitively expensive.

Instead, organisations should take advantage of the funded training programmes offered by the hyperscalers.

For example:

• AWS can run immersion days where their specialists conduct hands-on workshops covering cloud services or architectural patterns.
• Discounted digital learning courses, and certification exams, help you to efficiently upskill your internal talent to become cloud architects. Crucially, this avoids biting the bullet of high costs to bring in unknown external individuals at a high premium and instead invest in existing team members.

Modernisation Credits and Support

Hyperscalers actively encourage organisations to modernise and build innovative applications on their platforms.  Not only does this help to build their market presence, but also generates brilliant case studies, showcasing the ‘art-of-the-possible. Use this to your advantage.

For example, Microsoft offers:

• Azure Innovate and Azure Migrate and Modernise funding programmes
• This initiative provides direct account credits for funding for partner support to organisations looking to build custom cloud-native applications. This can be in the form of credits applied to your account, or funding for a specialist partner to collaborate with you.

My advice: if you’re looking at modernising an application or running a Proof of Value (POV) to trial a new cloud-native architecture pattern, work with your hyperscaler account manager to explore what funding and support levers are available to support you with that journey.

Funded Well-Architected Reviews

Running Well-Architected reviews on a continuous basis is imperative to operate a cost-effective, secure and efficient cloud platform. They provide a systematic framework to identify inefficiencies within your applications and remediate them.

Both Azure and AWS provide funding and partner support for third parties to help organisations evaluate and modernise their workloads against the well-architected frameworks.

Examples include:

AWS Well-Architected Partner Program which includes funding in the form of credits, when using a certified partner to review workloads. Additionally, their own complimentary Optimisation and Licensing Assessment helps optimise licence and compute costs.

Microsoft’s Azure Expert Managed Service Providers can conduct Well-Architected Reviews offering similar funded support and assessments.

These reviews allow organisations to bring in an external pair of ‘funded’ eyes to help independently assess workloads to find cost-efficiencies.

2. Build vs Buy Cost Avoidance

A common misconception with FinOps (Cloud Financial Management) is that   its primary focus is optimising workloads already running in the cloud. However, FinOps can also drive cost avoidance by guiding build versus buy decisions.

For example:

Use AWS and Microsoft calculators to forecast the potential cost of moving a workload to the cloud.

Comparing these forecasts against on-premises infrastructure or SaaS alternatives can guide your procurement decisions.

SaaS pricing models can be complex, loaded with semi-variable costs that are hard to unpick and forecast. Using specialist procurement tools, like Vertice, or FinOps frameworks such as FOCUS help analyse billing data from Cloud SaaS providers and transform it to compare against cloud run costs.

A mature FinOps practice will continuously review application costs to determine the most cost-effective for workloads.

3. Disaster Recovery and Backup Rationalisation

Having a blanket policy for disaster recovery (DR) and backup strategies which is only reviewed every few years is a common cause of wasted cloud costs. Instead, it’s important to define service criticality classifications with specific defined Recovery Time objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).

We’ve all heard from application owners within the business that their workload is a P1 or Platinum tier and deserves the fastest recovery time possible. Easy to say when you do not see or pay the associated cloud bill. By having a clearly defined and tested recovery runbook which determines which workloads get restored or rebuilt in priority order, you can customise the DR replicas and costs based upon this order. AWS and Azure offer various of storage and backup technologies to help organisations find the right balance between resiliency and costs.

Hopefully this gives you some food-for-thought on some of the endless possibilities available if you are looking to optimise your cloud costs. Whether through funding programmes, modernisation credits, or rationalising backup strategies, there are significant opportunities to reduce spend while maximising the value of public cloud platforms.

At Telefonica Tech offer a range of FinOps and Cloud services designed to help organisations address these challenges. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you reduce your cloud spend, please get in touch.

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