A major UK government department was looking to reduce cloud expenditure without compromising service stability.
Over time, Azure storage consumption had increased significantly. The opportunity was clear: reduce unnecessary cloud spend by moving suitable server data disks to a more appropriate tier. But the requirement was not simply to cut costs. The department needed to make the change safely, with clear understanding of dependencies, service impact and operational risk.
The challenge: Reducing cost without increasing operational risk
Cloud environments can build up costs over time. What starts as a sensible technical decision can become inefficient as workloads change, requirements evolve or services are inherited from other teams.
In this case, high-tier storage was increasing costs across several servers, while there was limited visibility of disk usage and service dependencies.
This created a practical challenge. The organisation needed to work out which servers could be safely re-tiered, understand which business services depended on them and coordinate the change without causing disruption for users.
The aim was to deliver clear financial savings while keeping services stable and avoiding unnecessary risk.
The approach: A controlled route to safe optimisation
The first step was to validate the environment. All 26 servers were assessed to confirm whether they could be safely re-tiered, with business services, dependencies and timing constraints all reviewed. A Business Impact Analysis and risk review gave the work a clear foundation for controlled delivery.
Stakeholder engagement was an important part of the approach. Business approvals were coordinated, schedules and mitigations were clearly communicated and RAID management was maintained throughout. This meant the optimisation was not treated as a standalone technical change, but as a managed business activity.
Implementation was then coordinated with the organisation’s cloud support provider, who carried out the disk changes. Pace managed the planning, readiness checks, stakeholder engagement, and post-change validation to make sure the work was delivered in a controlled and low-risk way.
The delivery: Executing the change and resolving issues quickly
The project successfully moved 26 servers from Premium SSD to Standard SSD, delivering the planned optimisation while keeping disruption limited.
During the migration window, three servers experienced a short, unexpected service interruption. The issue was resolved promptly. Affected services were restarted, the ShadowCopy cycle was cleared, and average downtime was around 30 minutes.
Importantly, the incident did not affect the savings case or the overall delivery timeline. It also led to a practical improvement: the organisation’s IT supplier changed the scheduled backup time, helping prevent similar user-impacting freezes in future and improving long-term service reliability.
The outcome: Recurring savings with no performance impact
The project delivered significant recurring savings, with no lasting impact on performance.
The organisation achieved £850k in annual recurring savings against a project cost of £62k. That meant a 1,239% Year 1 ROI, with payback achieved in under one month. Over five years, this equates to £4.1 million in cumulative savings.
All disk changes were validated, and there were no remaining performance issues. The work reduced unnecessary cloud cost, improved visibility of system dependencies, and strengthened coordination between technical teams, business stakeholders, and the cloud support provider.
Just as important, it created a clearer way to approach future optimisation. The organisation now had a practical model for identifying, assessing, and delivering further cloud savings without treating optimisation as a standalone technical exercise.
The result was a stronger foundation for ongoing cloud optimisation, where cost control and service stability could be managed together.
