SMEs need to get a grip on their cloud costs
According to the Office for National Statistics, in late May 2025, 77 percent of UK businesses with 10 or more employees reported that their staffing costs, covering wages, bonuses, national insurance (NI) and pension contributions, had increased over the preceding three months; a rise of 41 percent since late February 2025, and a 17 percent rise from the year before.
In the light of this Brian Sibley, Virtual CTO at Espria, says clear and concise billing models for the cloud are needed for a wholly comprehensive understanding and urges businesses to urgently assess their MS Azure subscriptions to reduce costs and improve services.
Departmental teams, such as IT, are being pressed to achieve more with less and must find the time to manage and maintain IT environments while delivering projects that provide genuine value to their organizations.
Added to this, the pace of technology changes, such as the rapid rise in business AI, makes it difficult to keep up with the latest best practices. Where once organizations rushed to digitally transform operations and migrate to cloud and cloud-hybrid infrastructure, now businesses must reassess and rearchitect their cloud infrastructure to minimize business costs and improve service levels.
“Unlike CSP renewals and M365 licenses, cloud environments such as Azure suffer from complex subscription models that can easily cause business inefficiencies,” says Sibley. “This approach allows for flexible resource management and cost control but requires business owners and IT operators to grasp where cloud operational inefficiencies lie, and how to optimize for costs without sacrificing productivity.”
In addition Sibley highlights that managed services analytics tools help cut out the confusion and give greater visibility to areas of business cloud environments racking up costs:
Mature internal visibility is needed for effective business decision-making, and that requires detailed expenditure and resource allocation analytics. Most SMEs have limited understanding around their IT costs, or a lack of expertise overseeing them, but, additionally, understanding a technically complicated environment from a finance perspective can be challenging in itself. Clear and concise billing models are needed for a wholly comprehensive understanding.
Realistically, SMEs cannot always afford top, best-in-show options, and so seeking better, cheaper options can be a push/pull factor when communicating between financial and operational needs. Your MSP can provide that needed consultancy, providing insights into realistic SLAs, RTOs and RPOs when improving services. This involves maintaining proper governance balanced against ROI and ongoing business continuity.
Similarly, many SMEs are using templates and infrastructure as code (IaC) models to deploy new software and updates to their cloud infrastructure, but this more generic approach doesn’t consider what individual needs and requirements the business has. Azure has something for everyone, but ensuring you’re only being billed for what you need is a critical part of cloud architecture management.
He urges businesses to prioritize their business needs and ensure that their IT delivery model is tailored to meeting their goals. This may mean using a managed services provider to get the experience and expertise needed to recommend the best steps for the organization.
Do you fully understand your cloud costs? Let us know in the comments.
Image credit: Baronoskie/Dreamstime.com