AWS Cost Optimisation · AWS
AWS cost optimisation: an architecture-led guide
Why AWS cost optimisation stalls at the tooling layer, and how hygiene, pricing and architecture each contribute to what an estate really costs.
Read the guide →
Managed FinOps
Continuous cloud cost management as a service. We monitor your estate, keep commitments current, review every month and track every action to completion, so spend never drifts back to waste.
25%
average reduction in annual cloud spend
Millions
of pounds saved across client estates
10 years
in cloud cost management
0%
of revenue from vendor commission
Cloud cost is not a project
Estates decay towards inefficiency by default. Reservations expire, workloads change shape, new services accumulate at the edges. Industry surveys put wasted spend at around 29% of cloud budgets, and an estate optimised once typically gives back much of the gain within a year.
Managed FinOps is our answer, and our core business: an ongoing retainer in which Cloudreason monitors, decides and acts on your cloud spend every month. Not a dashboard for you to check, and not a report for you to file. Senior engineers with continuous sight of your estate, making the changes that keep it efficient and tracking every one to completion.
Every month, without fail
Continuous monitoring of spend and usage, with anomalies investigated when they appear, not at month end
Reservation and commitment coverage kept current across the whole estate
A monthly review with findings prioritised in pounds, not in dashboard severity
Every action given a named owner and tracked to completion
What the retainer is made of
These are not separate products with separate price tags. They are the capabilities inside every Managed FinOps engagement, applied as your estate needs them. Every Cloudreason client is a retained client, and the architecture work, the commitment strategy and the training all happen inside those relationships.
Architecture-led cost reduction
The biggest savings are structural. Tuning trims a bill; re-architecting changes what a platform costs to exist.
Our two largest percentage reductions came from re-architecture, not tuning: a projected €1 million a year on Google Cloud redesigned down to a fraction of the projection, and an inherited AWS estate rebuilt to run at a quarter of its previous cost. A free vendor report can point at oversized instances. It cannot redesign how a platform stores, queries and moves data. That takes engineers, and it is the part of cloud cost work that no tool can do.
Storage, data and query patterns redesigned around cost
Right-sizing against real load, not launch-day guesses
Components removed when they no longer earn their place
Cost designed into new features before they ship
Commitment and reservation strategy
Independent advice on Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and enterprise agreement renewals, planned against your renewal dates.
Commitment discounts reach 70% and more against on-demand rates, but they reward decisions made before a renewal date, not after it. We keep coverage matched to what actually runs, resize before we commit so discounts compound the optimisation rather than freezing waste in, and prepare EA and private pricing renewals from your side of the table. We take no commission from any vendor, so a bigger commitment never earns us a penny.
Reserved Instance and Savings Plan coverage kept continuously current
EA and private pricing renewals prepared months ahead of the date
Commitments sized to the estate after optimisation, never before
No vendor commission on anything we recommend
Team enablement
We train finance and engineering teams to run FinOps themselves.
A consultancy that teaches its clients to need it less sounds like a poor business model. In practice it is why our longest engagements have run for six and eight years: the value shifts from finding savings to keeping an organisation permanently good at this. Finance learns where to look. Engineering learns how to act. Both work from the same numbers, and the discipline survives staff changes because it lives in the organisation rather than in a consultant.
A shared view of cloud cost for finance and engineering
Engineers who know what a change costs before they make it
Reviews your team can eventually chair without us
Knowledge transfer as an explicit objective, not a side effect
Independent cloud advisory
Spend decisions, build-versus-buy and migration business cases, from advisers with no stake in the answer.
When a client asked us to approve roughly £1 million of storage hardware, our advice was not to buy it. We designed an alternative they run themselves at a fraction of the cost. Advice like that is only possible because our revenue comes from clients and nobody else. Whether the question is a migration business case, a build-versus-buy decision or a supplier proposal that feels too big, we answer it with engineering evidence rather than a sales target.
Migration and modernisation business cases
Build-versus-buy and supplier proposal reviews
Second opinions before large commitments are signed
Advice priced in fees, never in margins on what you buy
How engagements begin
Most Managed FinOps engagements start with the Cloud Cost Health Check: three days, fixed scope, fixed price. It tells you what your estate should cost and exactly where the gap is, and it gives both of us the evidence to decide whether ongoing management is worth it. No obligation follows it; the findings are yours either way.
About the Cloud Cost Health Check →The other thing we run continuously
The same discipline that keeps your costs down can keep your estate compliant. Cloud Compliance applies the monitor, fix and evidence model to ISO 27001, Cyber Essentials Plus, the NCSC Cloud Security Principles and PCI DSS, worked back from your audit date.
About Cloud Compliance →FinOps guides
How we think about cloud cost, written down. Practical guides to the work inside the retainer: optimisation, commitments, allocation and storage, across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Commitments · AWS + Azure
Savings Plans vs Reserved Instances: a commitment strategy guide
How AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances differ, what Azure reservations add, and how to size commitments without freezing waste into your estate.
Read the guide →Cost Allocation · AWS + Azure + Google Cloud
Cloud cost allocation and tagging: making the bill mean something
A practical approach to tagging, showback and unit economics on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and why allocation is the foundation of FinOps.
Read the guide →Storage Costs · AWS + Azure + Google Cloud
Cutting cloud storage costs: tiers, lifecycles and the data nobody reads
How storage tiers, lifecycle policies and retention discipline cut cloud storage costs on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and the retrieval traps to avoid.
Read the guide →Azure Cost Optimisation · Azure
Azure cost optimisation: licensing, commitments and architecture
Where Azure estates overspend: unclaimed licensing benefits, lapsed commitments, unbounded log ingestion, and the architecture work underneath.
Read the guide →Google Cloud Cost Optimisation · Google Cloud
Google Cloud cost optimisation: the bill lives in the data
Why Google Cloud bills are won and lost in data design: BigQuery pricing, committed use discounts, Spot VMs and the defaults worth changing early.
Read the guide →Frequently asked questions
What does the Managed FinOps service include?
Continuous monitoring of spend and usage, reservation and commitment management, a monthly review with actions prioritised in pounds, and every action tracked to completion by a named owner. Architecture-led cost reduction, commitment strategy for renewals, team enablement and independent advisory all sit inside the retainer rather than being sold separately.
How is Managed FinOps different from cloud cost management tooling?
Tooling reports; it cannot decide or act. Our engineers make the changes themselves, from resizing and reservation purchases to re-architecting storage and data flows, and track each one to completion. Telling waste apart from headroom takes judgement, and judgement is exactly the part software cannot do.
Which cloud platforms does Cloudreason manage?
AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, including multi-cloud estates, plus Kubernetes wherever it runs. Our longest engagement has run continuously for eight years.
Do you take commission from AWS, Microsoft or Google?
No. Cloudreason takes no vendor commission, referral fee or reseller margin. All of our revenue comes from client fees, so a bigger cloud bill never benefits us, and we encourage clients to hold their vendor relationships directly in their own name.
Is our estate too small for Managed FinOps?
Probably not. We manage estates from five-figure single-account environments to seven-figure multi-cloud estates, scaling the same discipline proportionately. The Cloud Cost Health Check is the quickest way to find out whether the numbers work for you.
How do we get started?
Almost every engagement begins with the Cloud Cost Health Check: three days, fixed scope, fixed price. It quantifies the opportunity in your estate before you commit to anything ongoing.
Ready to put your cloud costs under management?
Book a free consultation and we'll tell you honestly whether Managed FinOps fits your estate, and what it should save.