Reduce Cloud Costs Without Hurting Performance
Layots Technologies cuts AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud bills through FinOps: right-sizing against real utilisation, reserved and committed-use pricing, off-peak shutdown of non-production resources and removal of idle spend. Clients typically save 20–40% of annual cloud spend, and continuous reviews keep it from creeping back.
- typical annual saving
- 20–40%
- typical annual saving
- of utilisation reviewed
- 90 days
- of utilisation reviewed
- AWS, Azure, GCP
- 3 clouds
- AWS, Azure, GCP
Free Cloud Cost Review
Tell us your cloud and rough monthly spend; we will show where the savings are.
Signs you are overpaying for cloud
Cloud bills rarely jump in one go. They creep: capacity chosen during migration and never revisited, on-demand pricing left in place, and resources nobody remembers creating. If two or more of these sound familiar, there are savings to find.
- The monthly bill keeps rising but traffic and users have not
- No one can say which team or application owns which cost
- Everything is still billed at on-demand rates
- Servers chosen during migration have never been resized
- Development and test environments run 24/7
- The cloud bill went up after migration instead of down
Where the savings come from
Six levers account for most of the waste in a typical cloud estate. We work them in order of saving and risk, starting with the ones that cannot affect performance.
Right-sizing
Instances are usually sized for the launch, not the load. Resizing against 90 days of actual utilisation is the single largest recurring saving.
Reserved & committed pricing
Move genuinely steady workloads from on-demand rates to Reserved Instances, Savings Plans or committed-use discounts.
Off-peak scheduling
Automatically shut down development, test and other non-production resources outside working hours.
Idle & orphaned resources
Remove orphaned storage, unattached disks, idle load balancers and forgotten environments that bill every month.
Tagging & accountability
Attribute spend to business units and owners through consistent tagging, so cost becomes someone’s responsibility.
Licence right-sizing
Match software and cloud licences to real usage instead of paying for seats and editions nobody uses.
Sometimes the saving is leaving the cloud
Cloud economics reward variability. Steady workloads with flat, predictable demand are frequently cheaper on dedicated infrastructure or in colocation. We will tell you when a workload should move back, not just how to discount it.
- Bursty, seasonal or unpredictable traffic: keep it in the cloud and pay for what you use
- Flat, 24/7 steady-state load: compare reserved cloud pricing with colocation
- Regulated data with steady load: consider colocation with cloud burst for peaks
- Colocation services
How a cloud cost engagement works
- 01
Cost audit
Connect read-only to your AWS, Azure or Google Cloud billing and utilisation data, and map spend to workloads and owners.
- 02
Savings plan
A prioritised list of savings with the estimated monthly amount and the performance risk of each, so you approve what changes.
- 03
Implement
Right-size, reserve, schedule and clean up — in planned changes, with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) where it applies.
- 04
Govern
Continuous FinOps reviews, budgets and cost governance policies, with a monthly executive dashboard so spend stays down.
Running on Azure? See Microsoft Azure services and Azure FinOps. Planning a migration? See cloud adoption and migration.
Cloud cost optimization: common questions
Start with the savings that do not touch performance: remove idle and orphaned resources, schedule non-production environments off outside working hours, and move steady workloads to reserved or committed-use pricing. Then right-size instances against at least 90 days of real utilisation rather than guesses, so capacity matches the actual load. Layots ranks every change by saving and by performance risk before anything is changed.
Layots typically saves clients 20 to 40 percent of annual cloud spend through right-sizing idle resources, Reserved Instances or Savings Plans, and automated off-peak shutdown. On Microsoft Azure, a FinOps audit typically identifies 30 to 40 percent in savings. After a migration, most clients see a 25 to 40 percent reduction against their initial post-migration run rate.
FinOps (cloud financial operations) is the practice of making cloud spend visible, owned and continuously optimised. In practice it means tagging spend to teams, reviewing utilisation and pricing regularly, and setting governance policies so savings do not drift back.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, including multi-cloud estates. Layots is a Microsoft Azure partner and also runs Azure FinOps as part of its managed Azure service.
No. Steady-state workloads with flat, predictable demand are frequently cheaper on dedicated infrastructure or in colocation. Cloud economics reward variability — bursty traffic, seasonal peaks and unpredictable growth. Layots regularly recommends leaving part of an estate on-premise or in colocation when that is cheaper.
Usually because servers were moved like-for-like at on-demand rates and sized for the launch, not the load. Right-sizing against real utilisation, reserved pricing for steady workloads and removing leftovers from the migration normally bring the run rate down.
Insights
More on Cloud Cost Optimization
Find Out What You Could Save
Tell us which cloud you use and roughly what you spend each month. We will come back with where the savings are and what each one risks.
- A solution architect reviews your requirement
- We respond, usually within one business day
- You get a practical, costed recommendation
Prefer to talk now?