A leading insurance company operates a multi-subscription Azure environment supporting critical insurance applications, customer portals, data analytics platforms, and internal business systems. With teams spanning Development, QA, Production, and Data Analytics, cloud resources were provisioned rapidly to meet business demands. However, this agility came at a cost:
- Azure subscriptions across business units with no unified cost view
- Hundreds of resource groups with inconsistent tagging and governance
- Multiple Azure services including Virtual Machines, Azure SQL, Storage Accounts, App Services, and Microsoft Fabric
- No commitment discounts — all workloads running on full on-demand (pay-as-you-go) pricing
- Minimal negotiated savings through their existing agreement
The organization’s cloud spend was trending upward month over month, and the finance team could not answer fundamental questions: Where is our cloud budget being spent? Which applications are the most expensive? Are we paying for resources we don’t use?
The Challenges
- Blind Spending. No centralized cost view. Business units ran in silos, finance got one opaque Azure invoice, and nobody could answer: Where is our money actually going?
- Zero Commitment Discounts. 100% of compute workloads sat on full on-demand pricing — no Reserved Instances, no Savings Plans, no negotiated discounts. They were paying sticker price for VMs, Data Explorer, App Service Plans, and Microsoft Fabric. Money left on the table, every single hour.
- Resource Bloat. Idle VMs running 24/7 in non-prod. Oversized instances crawling at <15% CPU. Unused disks, orphaned storage, and ghost resources from dead projects — all still billing.
- No Accountability. Zero tagging governance meant zero chargeback. Teams had no skin in the game. The cloud bill was just “IT’s problem” — until it wasn’t.
- Manual Reconciliation Hell. Finance burned days every month matching invoices to usage. Discrepancies, surprise charges, billing errors — spotted too late, paid anyway.
- No Guardrails. No budgets. No alerts. No anomaly detection. Cost spikes from misconfigurations and data overages only surfaced when the invoice landed — already due.
Our Solution and Implementations
Enkaytech proposed a structured, phased approach to implement a FinOps practice centered on Microsoft Governance and Advisory guidance. The solution was designed to address visibility, optimization, governance, and accountability in a single integrated platform.
