Cloud costs can be difficult to understand
Microsoft analytics environments span Fabric capacity, Azure services, storage, data processing and Power BI. Understanding what is actually driving the bill isn't always straightforward.
Data & Analytics — Cloud Analytics Cost Optimisation
Get More From Your Analytics Platform. Spend Less Running It.
Cloud analytics platforms provide enormous flexibility, but without the right architecture and controls, costs can quickly exceed what organisations expected. We help organisations understand where their Microsoft analytics costs are coming from, identify unnecessary consumption and redesign environments to deliver the performance they need at a sustainable cost.
Why Analytics Costs Need Active Management
Analytics spend rarely grows because of a single decision. It grows through architecture, workload patterns and usage changes accumulating over time — which is also where the opportunities to reduce it are found.
Architecture drives cost
Solutions that work technically are not necessarily cost-efficient. Capacity sizing, data architecture, refresh patterns, workloads and service choices all have a significant impact on ongoing costs.
Usage changes over time
More users, datasets, reports and workloads are added while legacy processes remain in place. An environment that was appropriately sized two years ago may no longer be optimised today.
Small changes can deliver significant savings
Better workload scheduling, capacity management, storage design, query optimisation or architectural change can reduce consumption without reducing the analytics capability available to users.
Our Approach
We connect what you pay back to how your analytics platform has been designed and is actually being used — not just to the invoice.
01
Understand
We review your current analytics environment, architecture, workloads, capacity utilisation and cloud expenditure to establish where costs are being generated.
02
Diagnose
We identify inefficient workloads, over-provisioned capacity, unnecessary processing, architectural constraints and opportunities to use Microsoft services more efficiently.
03
Optimise
We prioritise practical changes based on potential savings, implementation effort, performance requirements and operational impact.
04
Monitor
Where required, we help establish the monitoring, governance and capacity management practices needed to keep costs under control as the environment grows.
The objective isn't simply to reduce your cloud bill. It's to make sure the money you spend on analytics is delivering value.
Cost Optimisation in Practice
Cost optimisation work usually takes one of three forms, each grounded in real Microsoft analytics deployments.
Reducing Azure costs through architecture review
Reviewing an established Microsoft analytics environment to identify opportunities to simplify architecture, reduce unnecessary Azure consumption and improve the efficiency of the overall platform.
Right-sizing Microsoft Fabric
Assessing workloads and capacity requirements to determine the appropriate Fabric architecture and capacity — avoiding unnecessary investment while allowing for future growth.
Modernising legacy analytics platforms
Using migration to Power BI and Microsoft Fabric as an opportunity to rationalise existing infrastructure, datasets and processing rather than recreating legacy architecture in the cloud.
Where We Have Done This
Large-scale Microsoft analytics implementations where architecture, capacity and workload decisions directly affected platform running costs.
Navi Group
Building a scalable analytics platform with Microsoft Fabric
A reusable Fabric analytics foundation with Direct Lake reporting, row-level security and secure peer benchmarking.
- of pharmacies analysed on one platform
- 100sof pharmacies analysed on one platform
- of records processed
- 10s of millionsof records processed
HSE Dublin and Midlands Health Region
Cross-hospital performance visibility for HSE Dublin and Midlands
A governed regional BI platform and analyst service giving five hospitals standardised performance visibility on a need-to-know basis.
- hospitals on one governed platform
- 5hospitals on one governed platform
- population served
- 820,000population served
Food Safety Authority of Ireland
Modernising food safety analytics with Microsoft Power BI
A phased, domain-by-domain migration off SAP BusinessObjects to a governed Power BI and Fabric platform.
- reports migrated to Power BI
- ~130reports migrated to Power BI
- staff on the new platform
- 100+staff on the new platform
Scoped review
Not Sure If You're Paying Too Much for Cloud Analytics?
We offer a focused review of Microsoft analytics environments to identify potential cost savings and areas for optimisation. Depending on the size and complexity of your environment, we can review your current architecture, cloud expenditure and capacity utilisation, and provide a short assessment of the most significant opportunities for improvement.
The review can cover
- Current architecture and service choices
- Cloud expenditure and cost drivers
- Fabric capacity utilisation
- Workload, refresh and processing patterns
- Storage and data architecture
- Prioritised savings opportunities
Reviews are scoped and priced based on the complexity of your environment, with a low-cost initial assessment available for smaller deployments.
Explore our analytics case studies →