Achieving cloud cost control with FinOps for a global manufacturing organisation on Azure.
- A global manufacturing enterprise struggled with rising cloud costs, complex internal billing and highly autonomous teams.
- Nordcloud helped introduce FinOps practices on Azure, improving cost transparency, optimising reservations and reducing cloud waste.
Project Summary.
The challenge.
A global industrial manufacturing group invested heavily in public cloud services to support its digital transformation. Cloud adoption accelerated quickly across the organisation, but financial governance didn’t evolve at the same pace. While basic cost management practices existed, they were fragmented and inconsistently applied across the business.
The organisation operated through hundreds of internal business units, each acting as an internal autonomous customer. Teams made their own cloud decisions, managed their own budgets, and optimised for local goals rather than global efficiency. As a result, no single party had a complete view of cloud consumption or ownership.
This autonomy created several systemic challenges:
- Cloud resources were provisioned freely but were rarely reviewed
- Unused virtual machines, disks and legacy resources from on‑premises migrations continued to generate cost
- Teams often did not realise they were spending money – or how much
- Communication between IT, finance and internal customers was limited
Cloud costs were growing steadily, yet for many teams they remained abstract and detached from daily decision‑making.
A billing service under pressure.
One of the challenges was the organisation’s custom-built billing and invoicing service. It was designed to charge internal customers for their cloud consumption and internal service costs.
However, as cloud usage scaled, the billing service became increasingly complex. Consumption data came from multiple sources, a lot of processes was handled manually and errors were hard to detect.
Even though the organisation invested significant effort into maintaining this system, they still lacked transparency and confidence in the results.
Nordcloud’s approach.
Nordcloud joined the customer at a critical moment, assigning a dedicated FinOps expert who quickly became a trusted partner and “go‑to” person for cloud cost management.
He started by gathering understanding:
- How internal customers operated
- How decisions were made across autonomous teams
- How the billing service worked and where it broke down
- What financial and technical language different stakeholders used
The expert worked closely with both technical and business stakeholders, translating cloud consumption into financial language and helping teams see costs as something they could actively influence.
Making the billing and invoicing service work.
Nordcloud’s expert focused on stabilising and improving the billing and invoicing process.
Nordcloud helped the client:
Analyse how cloud consumption data flowed into the invoicing service
Identify where manual steps introduced errors or inconsistencies
Improve cost allocation logic, so internal customers paid for what they actually used
The solution.
Progress did not happen overnight. Given the autonomy of the customer’s internal units, a gradual, pragmatic approach proved essential. We discussed cost optimisations as opportunities with concrete examples; we gave recommendations based on impact and feasibility. And we went team by team.
Nordcloud’s FinOps expert:
- Designed and implemented a reservation strategy in Azure, estimating real usage needs, calculating potential savings and discussing proposals directly with business stakeholders before execution
- Introduced automation to shut down virtual machines outside working hours, reducing waste from resources running 24/7 without purpose
- Identified unused disks and orphaned resources, systematically cleaning up cloud environments
- Supported and improved client’s internal billing service, ensuring costs were allocated more accurately and transparently
- Acted as a bridge between IT and business units, explaining costs, resolving billing questions and escalating issues when needed
Crucially, Nordcloud focused not only on optimization, but also on education and mindset change. Regular conversations, explanations and hands-on examples helped teams understand how everyday technical decisions translated directly into financial outcomes.
Changing how teams think about cloud costs.
Changing people’s mindset was harder than technical shift. Many teams had never been asked to think about cloud costs as part of their responsibilities. Cloud felt unlimited and invoices felt distant.
Nordcloud invested heavily in:
- Explaining costs in plain language
- Making consumption visible and relatable
- Showing how small changes led to measurable savings
- Reinforcing FinOps as an ongoing practice, not a one‑off project
Over time, behaviours began to change. Teams started asking questions before provisioning resources. Unused disks and virtual machines were cleaned up more proactively. Cost discussions became part of regular operational conversations.
Results.
Key outcomes included:
Annual cost savings achieved through optimisation, reservation right‑sizing and waste reduction
Significant reduction in unused and underutilised reservations, lowering long‑term financial commitments
Ten times less unused discs (and counting) from the start of the project
Improved accuracy and transparency in billing and invoicing, reducing internal disputes and support effort
Lower operational risk in the billing service through reduced manual handling and clearer allocation logic
Built internal FinOps competence to sustain progress independently
Beyond the numbers, cloud cost management shifted from reactive problem‑solving to a shared responsibility across the organisation.
