Cloud spend is one of the few large line items that grows without anyone approving the increase.
The decisions that set it were made years ago, by people solving a different problem.
How it works
The forcing event is usually a date: a committed spend agreement ending, a renewal quote arriving, or a finance review that flags cloud as the fastest growing line. Someone is asked what the next commitment should be and finds that nobody can explain the current one. Billing detail exists, but it is organized by service and account, not by application or owner. The commitment gets signed again at a higher number because there is no time left to do anything else.
The work is inventory first, then placement, then price. We map what runs where, what it costs fully loaded, and what a move would actually require. That includes the items no provider calculator shows: egress between regions, licensing that changes when the platform changes, and a team that only knows one console. What you end up with is a placement and commitment position that survives a finance review.
There is no product to sell. Compensation comes from the vendors through the TSD model, so the engagement carries no cost to you and the recommendation follows the requirements rather than a quota.
Start where it applies
Workloads landed where they are by default, not by decision
A commitment is coming up and nobody understands current consumption
Egress, storage, or reserved capacity costs are moving the wrong direction
The current agreement was signed with no ramp or exit discussion
Workload Placement
Most placement decisions were made once, by whoever built the thing. Nobody revisits them, because nothing looks broken. Placement gets reviewed when a bill or an outage forces it.
What gets mapped
- Applications lifted to IaaS instances and never refactored since migration
- Where the system of record database sits and what depends on it
- Latency limits for plant floor, point of sale, or clinical systems
- Workloads pinned by an ISV support matrix or a compliance boundary
Workloads rarely move because someone proved they were in the wrong place. They move when a lease ends, a support contract expires, or the person who built them leaves, so the useful question is which of those dates is closest.
Provider Comparison
A comparison is only as good as the consumption data behind it. Most organizations have billing detail but no line from invoice to application. Until that mapping exists, every provider quote is a guess.
What gets compared
- Billing line items mapped to named applications and business owners
- Private pricing and committed use discount tiers on each platform
- Support plan cost, usually quoted as a percentage of monthly spend
- Whether existing licenses travel, and the price if they do not
Providers quote against a competitor's list price, not against the deal you already hold. Ask for both proposals restated in your own consumption units, and the gap on the slide usually shrinks to something close to a rounding difference.
Cost Modeling
The compute line is rarely the problem. The growth is in data movement, storage tiers, and capacity reserved against a forecast that has since changed. A model shows that before the invoice does.
What the model covers
- Egress by direction: internet, inter region, and cross account transfer
- Storage sitting in hot tiers past any real access pattern
- Reserved instance and savings plan coverage against steady state usage
- Backup retention and snapshot sprawl measured in dollars per month
Egress charges almost always trace to an architecture decision rather than a usage spike: a chatty integration, a backup target in another region, an analytics job pulling full tables every night. That is worth knowing before you negotiate the rate, because a rate does not fix a pattern that scales with growth.
Commitment and Exit Negotiation
The first agreement is usually signed under time pressure, with attention on the discount and nothing else. Ramp schedule, shortfall treatment, and end of term rights get left at default. Those terms decide more than the headline percentage does.
What gets negotiated
- Ramp schedule matched to the migration plan, not the sales year
- Shortfall treatment: true up, rollover, or penalty at term end
- Egress waivers for data leaving when the agreement ends
- Termination for convenience and assignment language for a future sale
A clean exit clause is worth more than another point of discount, because it is the only term that gives you a real alternative at the next renewal. Providers can tell which customers are actually able to move, and they price accordingly.
How the engagement runs
Understand your environment
Current inventory, contract dates, sites, and what the business actually needs the technology to do.
Define where you want to go
Target state, growth requirements, and success criteria, all agreed before a single vendor is contacted.
Evaluate solutions
The requirement goes to every provider that can meet it, and the responses come back on terms that can be read side by side.
Define a solution and negotiate terms
Pricing, term length, service levels, and exit language are settled before signature rather than discovered on the first invoice.
Oversee activation
We stay in the project through installation, porting, and acceptance, and we escalate on the client's behalf when dates slip.
What you walk away with
A workload inventory listing every application, its platform, and its fully loaded monthly cost
A provider comparison priced against your own consumption rather than published list rates
A three year cost model with ramp, growth, and exit scenarios in one spreadsheet
A negotiation position summary: terms to request, terms to refuse, and fallback language
Questions we get
- Do you recommend one cloud provider over the others?
- No. The right platform depends on where your data sits, what your applications require, and which agreements you already hold. We run the same comparison across the providers that meet your requirements and show you the arithmetic behind it. When two options are close, we say they are close rather than manufacture a winner.
- We already have a cost management tool. What does this add?
- A cost tool reports what already happened. It does not tell you whether a workload belongs somewhere else, and it has no view into contract terms you have not signed yet. We use your tool's data as an input and spend the time on the placement and commercial questions it cannot answer.
- Is moving workloads back to owned infrastructure ever the right answer?
- Sometimes, for steady state workloads with predictable load and heavy storage. The cases that pencil out tend to be large, single purpose, and stable for years, and they usually require capacity you already own or a colocation contract you are prepared to sign. Most environments have one or two of those and a long list of workloads that should stay where they are. The model tells you which is which.
- How are you paid if the engagement costs us nothing?
- Compensation comes from the provider through the TSD model, which stands for technology services distributor. When a contract is signed, the provider pays a distribution fee that would otherwise go to its own direct sales team. Your pricing comes off the same rate card either way.
- What if the right answer is staying where we are?
- That gets recommended when it is correct. A renegotiated contract with the incumbent, or leaving a working system alone, counts as a finished engagement and gets the same work as a migration.
- When should we start relative to our contract end date?
- Roughly six months out. Auto-renewal notice windows commonly close 60 to 90 days before term end, and starting inside that window removes most of the leverage. Check your specific renewal clause, since the window is the constraint rather than the end date.
The market we compare for you.
The first conversation is a scoping call, not a pitch.
Bring your last three monthly invoices, the current commitment agreement with its end date, and a rough list of which applications run where. That is enough to say whether there is anything worth pursuing.
The first conversation is a scoping call, not a pitch.
We ask what you have, what is expiring, and what is not working, then tell you whether there is work here worth doing. If Elk Run is not the right fit for the decision in front of you, we will say so.