Plenty of MSPs have now finished their first Azure migrations. The workloads moved, the customer signed off and everyone moved on.
Then the bills started coming in, and each one looked a little different.
This happens because on prem and cloud work in completely different ways. On prem, you buy the hardware, run it for a few years and then refresh it. In Azure, you pay every month for what you use. That gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also means someone has to manage the estate every month, not every few years.
In new Azure estates, wasted spend usually comes from a few familiar places.
Oversized VMs. During migration, teams usually size high to be safe. Nobody goes back to check, so the customer keeps paying for capacity they never use.
Missed reservations. If a workload will run for a year or more, reserving it can bring the compute cost down a lot. But someone has to spot the opportunity and act on it, and in most new estates nobody does.
Forgotten resources. Old VMs and unused disks keep costing money long after anyone needs them.
Reconciliation gaps. Margin rarely leaks inside Azure itself. It leaks in the gap between what Microsoft charged and what you billed your client.
None of this is a flaw in Azure. It’s a visibility problem, and visibility problems can be fixed.
“Won’t the bill be unpredictable?” Costs change from month to month because usage changes. The surprises come when nobody can see what’s driving them. With the right view, most of the guesswork goes away.
“Will cloud eat into our margin?” Only if waste goes unnoticed. Oversized resources, forgotten VMs and reservations that don’t match actual usage can all be caught with the right process and tools.
“Do we give up control?” You swap physical control for visibility and governance. With a clear view across every client estate, you get more control than on prem ever gave you.
Leader Cloud helps you move customers to Azure and supports you locally along the way. Kalibr8 helps you manage the estate once it’s running.
Together, they give you one view across every client estate. That view includes:
So when a customer asks about their bill, you can show them which VMs are oversized, which workloads should be reserved and how much they could save. That’s a conversation that builds trust and keeps customers with you.
We’ll walk through a situation most partners will recognise. You manage a large customer’s Azure tenant and want to answer two questions: are the VMs the right size, and are the reservations giving full value?
Step by step, you’ll see how to run an optimisation project through Leader Cloud and Kalibr8. First, find and remove what isn’t being used. Next, rightsize what’s left based on real usage. Then put the right reservations in place. You’ll also see why the order matters: sorting size first keeps your reservations accurate.
In this session:
This is a practical session for partners, not a sales pitch. Bring your questions.