Cloud Cost Optimisation: pay for what you use, not what you forgot to turn off.
Cloud platforms make it easy to provision resources and surprisingly easy to forget to turn them off. Idle virtual machines, oversized instances, orphaned storage volumes, and redundant services accumulate silently and drive your monthly bill higher every quarter. North Star's cloud cost optimisation service audits your Azure or AWS environment, finds the waste, and implements controls that keep costs in check going forward - without impacting performance or availability.
Why do cloud costs grow out of control?
Cloud billing is complex and opaque. Costs come from dozens of resource types: compute, storage, network egress, licensing, support plans, and third-party marketplace items. Resources provisioned for a project and never decommissioned continue to incur charges indefinitely. Instance types chosen at launch without rightsizing analysis are often two to three times larger than the workload requires. Development and test environments left running overnight and on weekends can cost as much as production environments. Reserved instance or Savings Plan commitments purchased without analysis end up covering the wrong resources. North Star's optimisation audit uses cloud-native cost management tools plus third-party analysis to identify every category of waste, quantify the savings opportunity, and implement changes in order of impact. Most organisations see 20 to 40 percent cost reduction within 90 days of an optimisation engagement.
What North Star delivers.
Full inventory of cloud spend by service, resource, and team.
North Star pulls your billing data and tags every resource by purpose, owner, and utilisation. You see exactly what you are paying for and what you are not using.
Resize oversized instances to match actual workload requirements.
Most cloud instances are provisioned conservatively and run at 20-40% CPU utilisation. Rightsizing to the correct instance type delivers immediate savings with no performance impact.
Commit to one or three-year terms for stable workloads and save up to 60%.
Reserved instances and Savings Plans for predictable workloads provide significant discounts over on-demand pricing. North Star analyses your usage patterns before recommending commitments.
Identify and decommission unused VMs, disks, snapshots, and IPs.
Orphaned resources from old projects accumulate without anyone noticing. North Star identifies and removes idle resources with your approval.
Budgets, alerts, and tagging policies to prevent future drift.
After the initial cleanup, North Star implements tagging requirements, budget alerts, and monthly spend reviews so costs do not creep back up.
Monthly spend review included in managed cloud retainer.
Cloud costs change as your business changes. North Star's monthly review catches new sources of waste before they accumulate.
What buyers ask before they sign.
How much can we expect to save?
Savings vary by environment and history. Organisations that have grown their cloud environment without active cost management typically save 20 to 40 percent within 90 days. Environments that have already been optimised see smaller but still meaningful reductions. North Star quantifies the estimated savings before the engagement begins.
Will rightsizing affect our application performance?
No, if done correctly. North Star analyses actual CPU, memory, and network utilisation over 30 to 90 days before recommending any instance size changes. Rightsizing targets resources running well below their provisioned capacity.
How does North Star access our cloud billing data?
North Star requires read-only access to your Azure Cost Management or AWS Cost Explorer data, and read-only access to your resource inventory. No changes are made without explicit approval.
What is the difference between reserved instances and Savings Plans?
Reserved instances commit to a specific instance type, region, and operating system in exchange for a discount. Savings Plans are more flexible - they commit to a dollar amount of compute usage per hour rather than a specific instance type. AWS offers both; Azure offers reserved instances and Azure Savings Plans. North Star recommends the right commitment type based on your usage patterns.
How much does a cloud cost optimisation engagement cost?
North Star charges a fixed fee for the initial audit and optimisation project, typically $1,500 to $4,000 depending on environment complexity. Ongoing monthly cost management is included in North Star's cloud managed services retainer.
Ready to cut your cloud bill?
Tell us about your environment and we will come back with a scoped proposal in two business days. No obligation, no pressure.
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