Most Azure overspend we find isn't the result of one big mistake — it's a handful of small, recurring ones that compound over months. A few places worth checking before assuming you need to cut something your team actually uses.
Orphaned resources
Disks, public IPs, and snapshots left behind after a VM is deleted keep billing indefinitely. They're invisible in most day-to-day views and only show up when someone actually goes looking for unattached resources.
Oversized VMs running 24/7
It's common to provision for peak load and never revisit the size once traffic settles. Right-sizing based on actual utilization — combined with auto-shutdown for dev/test environments outside business hours — is usually the single biggest lever available.
Reserved capacity left on the table
If a workload runs continuously and predictably, pay-as-you-go pricing is almost always the most expensive way to run it. Reserved Instances or Savings Plans on stable workloads routinely cut compute costs by 30–60% with no change to the workload itself.
None of this requires re-architecting anything — it just requires someone to actually look. That's the starting point for our Azure Cost Savings Assessment.