If you’ve ever opened your Azure invoice and thought, “Why is this so high again?”, you’re in good company. Chances are, your business moved to Azure expecting lower costs, better flexibility, and easier scaling. That’s exactly what Azure should give you. But even if the bill is static, that doesn’t mean it’s optimal. Oftentimes, nobody can clearly explain why, and it becomes increasingly difficult to defend that spending to the board.
Over the years, I’ve seen businesses of all sizes fall into the same cost traps in their Azure environments that ultimately result in wasted spend. But the good news is these mistakes are fixable.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the five most common cost traps we see inside real Azure environments. These aren’t theoretical issues; they’re patterns that repeatedly show up when we audit customer environments. By the end, you’ll know where to look, what questions to ask, and what changes can reduce your Azure bill without disrupting your people or compromising performance.
Before we get into the specific cost traps, it’s important to understand one thing: Azure itself isn’t inherently expensive; unmanaged Azure is.
Azure is generally billed on a pay-as-you-go model: you pay for the compute, storage, networking, and services you consume. That flexibility is brilliant only if you actively manage what you provision and how it’s used.
With that being said, let’s unpack the five cost traps we see most often.
In the old on-prem world, buying more hardware than you actually needed wasn’t a big deal.
If you’d already paid for a physical server, it didn’t cost much extra to throw in extra RAM (memory) or CPU (processing power). IT professionals deliberately ‘future-proofed’ servers, for example, with 64GB of RAM for workloads that may only need 16GB. You paid once, used it for years, and everybody was happy.
When those workloads move into Azure, a lot of businesses repeat that thinking: “This server had 64GB RAM in our data centre, so we’ll pick the 64GB Virtual Machine in Azure.” However, the difference in the cloud is that you’re now paying every month for that oversized capacity.
When we look at Azure environments, we regularly find:
Put simply, that’s a massive overspend which stems from previous assumptions carried into a new model. So, if you haven’t looked at your VM utilisation in a while, there’s a good chance you’re paying for “just in case” capacity that brings you no real benefit. After all, a key benefit of Azure is that you can add that capacity as and when you need it.
This is probably the most common pattern our Azure consultants see.
Azure is easy to spin up. A few clicks and you’ve got a VM, a database, and a new service to test. That’s great for agility. But if nobody takes ownership of what happens after that, your environment slowly fills with:
Things get more complicated when there are multiple admins and sub-subscriptions. If one team creates resources and another team pays the bill, there’s a natural disconnect. The people spinning things up don’t feel the cost. So, without some kind of regular review and basic governance, Azure spend tends to inflate quietly over time. You end up paying for things nobody remembers asking for.
This is another highly common cost trap, but it’s also one of the easiest things to fix.
Take Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) as an example. A typical scenario is 50 people using virtual desktops during normal office hours, yet the environment runs 24/7. So, even though nobody is using those desktops overnight or at weekends, you’re still paying for the computing as if they are.
In most businesses, roughly one-third of the week is “working hours.” The remaining two-thirds of the week, your users are at home, asleep, or doing something else entirely. If your environment doesn’t scale down when users log off, you’re effectively burning compute budget for no reason.
What we typically do is:
The users don’t notice any difference: they log in when they need to, the resources are there, and everything feels the same. But from a cost perspective, you’re only paying high compute rates when they’re actually needed. You still pay for storage, of course, but compute is often the largest part of the bill.
This one is more architectural.
With on-prem, the answer to most requests – whether it was a database, line-of-business app or new tool – was simply to get a server. When businesses move to Azure, they often recreate that architecture – a database server, an application server, and a file server – all as VMs in the cloud.
Benefits often include:
So, if you’ve simply lifted your on-prem server layout into Azure without rethinking it, chances are you’re paying more than you need to (and making more work for your IT team at the same time).
That sounds like an easy win, and it absolutely can be. But the problem is when organisations:
Now they’re committed to paying for too many resources for one or three years.
I’ve seen companies do this with good intentions by trying to be cost-conscious. But if you commit before you properly understand your actual usage, RIs become a cost trap instead of a cost saver.
Reserved Instances aren’t automatically good or bad: they’re powerful when used at the right stage. When used too early, they lock in the waste.
Let’s step away from the technical side for a second.
When a business is overspending on Azure, this usually results in:
The important point is this: most Azure overspend is avoidable. You don’t need to rip everything out. You just need to understand where the waste is and take systematic action.
Start with data, not guesses.
This part can feel overwhelming if you’re not living in Azure every day, but it’s essential. You can’t optimise what you can’t see.
For each significant resource, work through three questions:
1. Do we still need this at all?
If the answer is no, turn it off or delete it. That’s immediate, clean savings. REMEMBER: just turning off a machine doesn’t stop all the costs.
2. If we do need it, is it the right size?
Check utilisation. If it’s consistently low, consider scaling down and restarting with smaller specs.
3. Is there a better way to deliver this function?
For example, should that database live on a managed service rather than a full VM?
Could shared services replace multiple standalone machines?
Those three questions alone uncover a lot of obvious waste.
You don’t need a huge FinOps team to make this work. For many mid-sized organisations, something like this is enough:
Think of it as a regular health check for your Azure estate.
Finally, don’t underestimate the value of someone who looks at Azure environments all day, every day. We know where to look first and which patterns almost always hide savings.
Often, we can find 20–30% cost reductions just by:
For stretched internal IT teams, that outside perspective can be the difference between feeling “stuck with the bill” and feeling back in control.
Let me bring this to life with a real example.
One of our customers, a recruitment firm with around 150 users, came to us because their Azure bill felt too high, and they couldn’t explain exactly why.
Here’s what we found:
We went through the process I’ve just described:
The outcome?
Those are the kind of results you get when you treat Azure as something to be managed, not just something you “have.”
Overspending in Azure is incredibly common, especially for SMBs with small IT teams who are already firefighting day-to-day issues.
But the important thing to remember is that it’s fixable. You don’t need to rebuild everything. You just need to identify and address the cost traps that translate into unpredictable bills, budget pressure, and scepticism about whether the cloud is worth it.
My team and I help businesses like yours make sense of their Azure environments, cut the waste, and get their costs back under control without breaking what’s already working.
If you suspect you’re overpaying — or you simply want clarity — get in touch with us and one of our Azure consultants would be more than happy to take a closer look at your estate.