Diagnostic Engagement
Cloud Cost Optimization Audit.
Find the spend you can cut without breaking what's working.
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1–2 weeks
typical engagement duration
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2–4 hours
total time required from your team
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$3,500–$6,500
fixed, by environment scope
Why this matters.
Cloud bills grow the way SaaS bills used to grow — quietly, monthly, and faster than the people approving them realize. Most organizations spending two to twenty thousand dollars a month on Azure, M365, or AWS have at least fifteen to thirty percent waste in there: orphaned resources, oversized VMs, mis-tiered storage, over-licensed seats, missed reserved-instance opportunities, abandoned dev environments. The waste isn't anyone's fault — it's the natural drift of a platform that bills by the second and grows by accretion. The audit names the waste in dollar terms, ranks it by effort, and gives you a plan you can hand to engineering or your MSP.
What we do.
Read-only access to your cloud accounts and billing portal — no agents installed, no production changes, no infrastructure touched during the audit. License and SKU analysis across whichever platforms you're spending on (Azure, AWS, GCP, M365 productivity, M365 Copilot if relevant). Reserved-instance and savings-plan opportunity identification. An abandoned-resource scan. Right-size recommendations for compute and storage. Mis-tiered storage findings. License-pooling opportunities for M365. A prioritized savings plan with concrete dollar amounts and effort estimates for each line item.
What you walk away with.
A written savings plan with dollar amounts you can plug into a budget conversation. Each line item is sortable by effort, by impact, and by risk — "cut these tomorrow, no risk" through "worth doing but plan the change window." The plan is yours. You implement, your MSP implements, or we scope a separate Targeted Project to do the implementation work. The audit deliverable doesn't depend on you choosing any of those paths. If the audit surfaces broader infrastructure questions alongside spend, the IT Health Check covers the full environment diagnostic. For ongoing FinOps governance between audits, the vCIO Retainer is the right recurring shape.
What's in scope.
Read-only audit of cloud spend across Azure, AWS, GCP, M365 productivity, and M365 Copilot license posture (whichever platforms you're on). License and SKU rightsizing analysis. Reserved-instance and savings-plan opportunity identification. Orphaned and abandoned resource scan. Storage tiering review. Right-size recommendations for compute. M365 license-pooling opportunities. Written savings plan with concrete dollar amounts, effort estimates, and risk classification per line item. A 60-minute walkthrough of the plan with you and any stakeholders.
What's out of scope.
Implementation of the recommendations — that's a separate engagement, scoped specifically against the plan. FinOps tooling rollout (Cloudability, CloudHealth, Densify, native Cost Management dashboards). Multi-cloud cost-allocation tagging strategies as a standalone deliverable (we'll flag tagging gaps; design and rollout is its own scope). Ongoing FinOps governance — that's vCIO Retainer territory if you want a quarterly check on spend drift. Procurement negotiation with cloud vendors on your behalf.
This is the right engagement when…
- You're spending two thousand dollars a month or more on cloud services without a dedicated FinOps capability, and the bill is trending the wrong direction.
- You're heading into a budget cycle, an audit, or board scrutiny on technology spend, and you want a defensible number for "what we can cut" before the conversation starts.
- You went through an M&A event, a divestiture, or a platform migration in the past twelve months, and the cloud accounts haven't been pruned of the leftover resources from the previous shape.
- Your MSP or cloud reseller does the cloud cost management for you, and you want a vendor-neutral second opinion on whether the right-sizing they've already done is enough.
What you receive across the engagement.
- Written savings plan Primary deliverable. Each finding listed with the platform, the issue, the recommendation, the estimated annual savings, the implementation effort, and the risk classification. Sortable, filterable, ready to plug into a budget conversation.
- Executive summary One to two pages, total annualized savings opportunity by category, with a "do this first" short list. Presentable in a board context.
- License posture memo Separate one-pager when M365 license rightsizing is in scope. Names the right SKU mix (Business Basic vs. Standard vs. Premium, E3 vs. E5, Copilot Business vs. Microsoft 365 Copilot), seat-count recommendations, and any nonprofit / TechSoup eligibility you're leaving on the table.
- 60-minute walkthrough Live session with you and any stakeholders you want present. Recording is yours.
- 30 days of email Q&A Follow-up access while your team works through the plan.
Here's the shape of a finding the audit is built to surface.
Pricing model — fixed-price by default.
The default engagement is a fixed-price audit in the $3,500–$6,500 band, sized by environment scope (number of cloud accounts, license complexity, M365 scope). That model is right for buyers who want a defined invoice and a defined deliverable.
For organizations that prefer to align cost with measured outcome, an alternative model is available on request: 20% of year-1 documented savings, capped at $15,000. That model is right when (a) the spend is large enough that the cap doesn't bind, and (b) you have the operational capacity to actually implement the savings inside the year. We don't sell the percent-of-savings model on the storefront because most SMB buyers reasonably hate variable invoices — but if you want it, name it on the discovery call.
How we're different.
- Fixed-price productized. Most cloud-cost firms work on percent-of-savings only. Stratum's default is a fixed-price audit with a defined invoice — cleaner for SMB budgeting, no incentive to chase savings that aren't safe to take.
- Vendor-neutral. No reseller relationships, no Microsoft / AWS / Google referral fees, no MSP partnerships influencing the recommendations. If the answer is "your current MSP is doing the FinOps work fine," that's the answer.
- Read-only audit, no production touch. No agents installed, no infrastructure changes during the audit. Implementation is a separate, scoped engagement — yours to execute or hand to whoever you want.
Ready to find out where the spend you can cut is hiding?
Indiana · U.S. remote