THE 30% PROBLEM
How much of your Azure spend earns its keep?
The 30% Problem starts with a question: Flexera’s 2026 respondents estimated 29% wasted IaaS/PaaS spend across clouds.
Let’s test where cost ownership, implementation and operational safeguards meet in your estate.
THE EVIDENCE BEHIND THE QUESTION
29%
Estimated wasted IaaS/ PaaS spend
Source
Scope
Flexera • 2026
Across hyperscalers
■ Cost ownership
■ Implementation
■ Operational safeguards
01 / BETTER CONTROL
Visibility is useful only when someone can act on it.
What better control looks like
Explore how your team identifies priorities, agrees trade-offs, implements approved changes and verifies outcomes.
Shaping Cloud can work alongside internal teams and partners - the appropriate service scope is agreed after discovery.
02 / INVESTIGATION AREAS
What we actively look for
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Identify potentially unused or underutilised resources, without assuming recovery capacity is waste.
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Review compute sizing against actual demand, performance and availability constraints.
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Check storage lifecycle and access requirements before proposing cheaper tiers or platform changes.
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Trace apparently orphaned resources to workload and recovery owners before removal.
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Improve tagging, cost allocation and accountable ownership where gaps exist.
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Assess purchasing and commitments against coverage, utilisation and future flexibility.
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Make approval, implementation, rollback and verification responsibilities explicit.
03 / YOUR NEXT STEP
What you leave the 30 mins check with
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Your stated goals, spend range and operating model (as reported rather than independently verified).
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Possible actions and safeguards (no quantified saving without an agreed baseline and data review).
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A recommendation to proceed, defer or stop cost analysis. Proposed analysis and delivery is the next working day, subject to confirmed capacity.
IF A DEEPER REVIEW IS WORTHWHILE
If we believe there are genuinely realisable cost savings in your Azure estate, we will recommend a deeper review. The scope, price, and timetable of that are agreed with you before you are asked to accept it. The 30 min introductory check is not this deeper Azure Cost & Control Review.