Managed Azure and FinOps

What we build

The engagement starts with four weeks of build, then becomes a run. We do not take over an estate we have not first put into a defensible state, because inheriting undocumented infrastructure and calling it managed is how both sides end up disappointed.

Monitoring worth acting on. Azure Monitor with alert rules tuned to what actually matters, routed to a person, with the noisy defaults removed. An alert channel nobody reads is not monitoring, it is a record for the post-incident review.

Patching and lifecycle. Azure Update Manager with maintenance windows agreed per environment, patch compliance reported monthly, and an escalation path for the machine that always fails. Operating system and SQL end-of-support dates are tracked ahead of time, not discovered by a scanner.

Backup and recovery you have tested. Backup coverage verified against a written list of what must be recoverable and how quickly. Restores are tested on a schedule. A backup nobody has restored is a belief, not a control.

Posture and policy drift. Defender for Cloud secure score tracked with a monthly remediation target, Azure Policy compliance reported, and every exception dated and owned. Exceptions expire by default.

Cost management with named actions. Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor reviewed monthly, translated into a short list of specific changes with the saving next to each one. Not a dashboard, a decision list. Reservation and savings plan coverage is revisited quarterly against actual consumption.

Hybrid under one model. Azure Arc brings the servers, SQL instances and clusters that stayed on-premise under the same policy, monitoring and update management as the Azure estate.

Quarterly architecture review. One session per quarter that steps back: what changed on the platform, what your estate now does badly, what should be retired, and what we would do differently if we started today.

Sustainable IT and cloud efficiency

Start with the honest part: this overlaps almost entirely with the FinOps work above, and the cost argument remains the stronger one. A virtual machine that is switched off at night costs nothing and emits nothing, and in every conversation we have had, the invoice is what gets the change approved. We are not going to pretend otherwise in order to sell a separate sustainability program, and we do not sell one.

What is genuinely in scope is the efficiency side of the same estate, which is worth naming because the questions arrive from a different part of the organization.

Emissions alongside cost in the monthly review. Azure reports emissions figures for your subscriptions, and we put them next to the cost figures in the same monthly report rather than in a document nobody outside the sustainability team reads. The point is that the person deciding whether to switch off a non-production environment sees both numbers at once.

Region choice by carbon intensity. Azure regions do not run on the same grid, and where residency, latency and service availability leave a genuine choice, carbon intensity is a legitimate tiebreaker. It is worth saying that in regulated Canadian work the choice is usually already made by residency, and we will not pretend to an option that does not exist.

Right-sizing and scheduled shutdown. The same actions as the cost work: machines still sized from the physical server they replaced, non-production running 168 hours a week for a 45-hour work week, storage never moved to a cooler tier, orphaned disks and addresses nobody deleted. Every one of them reduces consumption and the bill together.

Retirement as a first-class action. The cheapest and cleanest workload is the one that was decommissioned. The quarterly architecture review asks what should be retired, and that question belongs here as much as it belongs in the cost conversation.

Now the limits, because they matter more than the pitch. We do not ship a certified or audited sustainability report, we are not an assurance provider, and the emissions figures come from Microsoft’s reporting with Microsoft’s own methodology and boundaries. What you get is the monthly action list with the emissions figure alongside the cost figure, and the record of what changed and when. That is a usable input to a CSRD submission or a client ESG questionnaire. It is not the submission, and the accounting and its assurance stay with you and your auditor. We will also not attach a carbon saving to an action we cannot trace to a specific resource change, which rules out most of the numbers this field likes to quote.

If the driver is purely financial, the cloud cost optimization solution is the shorter path and it is the same underlying work.

What you keep

• The inventory and baseline assessment, with the findings and their remediation status.
• Runbooks for every recurring operational task, written for your team to execute.
• Monitoring, alerting and dashboard configuration, in your tenant.
• The cost model and the monthly action lists, including the actions you declined and why.
• Patch compliance and backup verification history, usable as audit evidence.
• The quarterly architecture reviews, which together become the written history of the estate.

Who this is not for

If you want a 24/7 first-line help desk for end users, we do not do that and you should buy it from someone who does it well.

If you want managed services on an estate you will not let us change, the arrangement will not work. We can operate an architecture we disagree with, but not one we are not permitted to remediate.

If your goal is only to reduce the bill and you have no intention of changing how anything is deployed or scheduled, expect one round of savings and then a flat line. Durable cost control is an operating practice, not an exercise, and much of it is decided upstream in infrastructure as code.