Cost visibility and allocation
Tagging and account structure work so that spend can be attributed to a team, product or customer. Almost every cost conversation stalls here, and it is the least glamorous part of the job.
CypherMax-delivered
Find out where your cloud money actually goes.
Most cloud bills contain spending nobody has looked at in a year. We make the bill legible first, then work through it line by line with your team — targeting a reduction in run-rate.
Fit
This is for you if
- Your cloud bill has grown faster than your usage and nobody can fully explain the gap.
- Finance asks which team or product a cost belongs to, and there is no answer.
- You have been told to “reduce cloud spend” without being told what is safe to touch.
- You are being pushed toward a large upfront commitment and do not know whether your usage justifies it.
- You are raising a round and your gross margin is being questioned.
Scope
What is included
Waste identification
Unattached storage volumes, idle load balancers, over-provisioned databases, forgotten test environments, duplicated backups, data-transfer patterns that cost more than the compute they serve. Each finding comes with an estimated saving and a risk rating, so you decide what to act on.
Rightsizing
Matching instance and service sizing to observed usage rather than to the number someone picked during setup two years ago. Changes are proposed with the performance evidence attached.
Commitment and discount planning
Modelling reserved capacity, savings plans and committed-use discounts against your actual usage pattern before you sign anything multi-year. Where a partner programme, credit or incentive applies to your situation, we will identify it and tell you what it requires.
Architecture-level savings
The larger savings usually are not in the bill, they are in the design: storage tiering, caching in front of expensive origins, moving egress-heavy traffic behind a CDN, scheduling non-production environments to switch off overnight.
Reporting and forecasting
Monthly reporting on spend, unit cost and variance against forecast, so a cost problem is noticed in week two rather than at quarter end.
Process
How it works
| Phase | What happens | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Cost review | We analyse your billing history and your architecture. | A findings report: where the money goes, ranked opportunities with estimated savings and risk ratings. |
| 2. Remediation | Agreed actions executed, lowest-risk first, each one measured against a before-and-after baseline. | Realised savings, evidenced rather than projected. |
| 3. Ongoing management | Monthly reporting, anomaly alerting, forecasting, and a quarterly plan review. | Cost stays visible instead of drifting back. |
The target
What we aim for
Read that as a target, because that is what it is. The number we can actually reach in your environment depends on how it was built, how much commitment cover you already have, and how much of the spend is genuinely load-bearing. A tightly-run environment may have very little available; a neglected one may have far more.
What we will not do is quote you a figure before looking at your bill, and we would treat any provider who does with suspicion. The findings report in phase 1 gives you a specific number for your environment, with the reasoning shown.
The reduction in cloud run-rate we target in a FinOps engagement.
FAQ
FinOps FAQ
It should not. Most early findings are things nobody is using. Anything that touches a running workload comes to you as a proposal with performance evidence, not as a change we have already made.
No. Multi-cloud makes visibility harder, which is usually a reason to do this rather than a reason to postpone it.
Those tools show you the data. The work is in structuring the accounts and tags so the data means something, judging which findings are safe to act on, and actually carrying out the changes. The dashboard is the easy part.
We can model your usage, tell you what commitment level your pattern actually supports, and identify the partner programmes and incentives that apply to your situation.
Then you get a report confirming your environment is efficient, which is genuinely useful when someone asks. We would rather tell you that than manufacture findings.