Six places Azure spend hides (and a free audit script)

Orphaned disks, idle VMs, tags, storage tier, reservations, and dev rightsizing.

Six places Azure waste hides

Subscriptions accumulate cruft. VMs go away but disks stay. Public IPs linger. Dev environments outlive the sprint. Pay-as-you-go stays on workloads that should carry reservations. Premium storage holds cold data.

Here are the six categories we see on almost every review.

Orphaned disks and public IPs

Deleted VMs often leave managed disks and IPs billing at full rate.

Underused VMs

Low CPU for weeks usually means the workload is idle or mis-sized.

Untagged resources

No owner, no cost centre: nobody is accountable.

Premium storage on cold data

Backups and archives rarely need premium IOPS.

Pay-as-you-go on stable production

Reservations often pay back when utilisation is steady.

Oversized dev

Production SKUs in dev/test burn cash without improving delivery.

Sentinel Waste Finder

A free PowerShell script reports estimated monthly savings per resource in GBP, read-only. No subscription data leaves your environment.

When waste stacks up, a structured Azure WAF and FinOps engagement goes beyond the script: reservations, tagging policy, budgets, and an operating rhythm your team can run. Scope on westgatesentinel.co.uk.

Richard Stainforth, Westgate Sentinel Consulting Ltd. CISM.

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