Azure & AWS cost optimisation · South Africa
Stratus Yield re-engineers Azure and AWS systems to cost less. We photograph your spend before we start and again when we deliver. Our fee is 50% of the difference, for one year. If nothing is saved, you pay nothing.
Over 12 months: you keep R1.5m, our fee totals R1.5m. From month 13 the full R250,000 a month stays with you.
How it works
The whole engagement hangs on one number both sides agree on: what you spent per month before, compared with what you spend after. We define how it's measured before any work begins.
With read-only access we capture your monthly spend, resource inventory and utilisation. You sign off the figure.
We find the waste and fix it: rightsizing, commitments, storage tiers, licensing, and the architecture changes that keep costs down for good.
We measure again on the same basis. The saving is the monthly difference between Snapshot A and Snapshot B.
You pay 50% of that monthly saving for 12 months. After that the entire saving is yours.
Fees
Enter your monthly cloud bill and an expected saving. Most systems that have never had a dedicated cost review land somewhere between 15% and 35%. Your real number comes from the baseline.
| Per month | Over 12 months | |
|---|---|---|
| Saving | R250,000 | R3,000,000 |
| Our fee (50%) | R125,000 | R1,500,000 |
| You keep | R125,000 | R1,500,000 |
From month 13 you keep the full R250,000 a month, or R3,000,000 a year.
What we optimise
Quick wins pay for nothing on their own if the bill creeps back. We pair the billing levers with engineering changes to the systems themselves, so the lower number holds.
VMs, databases and node pools sized for last year's peak. We match capacity to measured utilisation and set up autoscaling.
Reservations and savings plans bought against a stable baseline, so you stop paying on-demand rates for always-on workloads.
Windows Server and SQL Server licences you already own, applied to the cloud instead of paid for twice.
Terabytes of hot storage that nobody reads. Lifecycle rules move data to cool and archive tiers, and old snapshots get cleared.
Unattached disks, forgotten test environments and dev machines running all weekend. Removed or put on schedules.
Lift-and-shift monoliths moved to containers or serverless, chatty services consolidated, and slow SQL queries tuned so smaller databases can carry the load.
Founders
Stratus Yield combines over 24 years of building enterprise systems with consulting and partnership experience from Stern Stewart & Co. and The Reach Trust.
Engineering & Architecture
Software architect with more than 24 years engineering enterprise systems for financial services, payroll and payments. Douglas leads the technical side of every engagement: reading the estate, finding the waste and making the architectural changes that keep costs down.
Partnerships & Growth
Strategic partnerships, business development and marketing professional with more than 15 years across consulting, executive recruitment and social impact. A former Stern Stewart & Co. management consultant, Sarah leads client relationships, commercial terms and the business case for each engagement.
A cost programme succeeds when the engineering is right and the CFO trusts the number. Douglas makes the systems cheaper to run. Sarah makes sure the baseline, the measurement and the commercial terms are clear to everyone who signs.
Questions
The short answers. We go through the detail at the baseline review.
Read-only access to billing and resource data to take the baseline: a Cost Management Reader role in Azure, or a read-only billing and inventory role in AWS. Changes are made through your change process, with your team.
Snapshot A and Snapshot B use the same scope and the same method, agreed in writing up front. The saving is the monthly difference between the two.
The fee is fixed to the saving measured at delivery, not to future bills. Growth in your business doesn't change what you owe us, and new workloads aren't counted against the baseline.
Then there's no difference between the snapshots and no fee. The baseline review itself costs nothing.
No. We can work alongside your MSP or partner, and many of the changes can be handed back to them to run.
Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, including hybrid systems that run on both.
Get started
Send us your approximate monthly Azure or AWS spend and the best person to talk to. We'll set up a call and explain exactly what Snapshot A would cover.