Driving Financial Control Across AWS and Azure
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
The client managed major AWS and Azure investments but faced a critical gap: AWS costs were tracked via CloudHealth, while Azure data—limited to invoices from a reseller—lacked detail, timeliness, and optimization visibility. This blind spot hindered multi-cloud financial reporting, leaving the client unable to achieve unified, granular cost transparency.
THE SOLUTION
Our team built a custom Azure cost reporting solution to overcome CloudHealth’s gaps. We automated Azure data exports, normalized billing outputs into AWS CUR-like formats, and visualized insights in QuickSight dashboards. This enabled daily and monthly spend tracking, resource-level breakdowns, anomaly detection, and forecasting—bringing CloudHealth-level cost visibility to Azure.
THE OUTCOME
The custom tool gave the client unified AWS-Azure visibility, daily cost transparency, and anomaly detection, enabling faster optimization. Interactive dashboards streamlined forecasting and decision-making, while eliminating manual invoice tracking reduced errors and effort. Time-to-insight dropped from weeks to one day, boosting operational efficiency and strengthening financial control across clouds.
About the Business
The Client is a privately held, specialty P&C insurer focused on delivering bespoke risk solutions across a broad range of product lines, founded in 2009. Today, the Client operates as a full-spectrum specialty underwriter across Property, Primary Casualty, Excess Casualty, Entertainment, Professional Lines, Binding Authority, and Marine, Energy, & Transportation.
The Business Challenges
The client managed substantial cloud investments across AWS and Azure, at the intersection of finance, operations, and IT governance. While AWS cost reporting and optimization relied on CloudHealth, Azure data could not be ingested because Azure was accessed through a third-party reseller. This created a significant blind spot in multi-cloud financial reporting and governance.
This created a major blind spot in their multi-cloud financial reporting strategy
- Azure cost visibility was limited to high-level totals on monthly invoices.
- There was no ability to break costs down by resource, subscription, or service.
- The lack of daily or near-real-time reporting created delays in identifying anomalies or optimization opportunities.
The client’s ultimate challenge was to achieve unified cost visibility across AWS and Azure—at the same level of granularity—to make better business decisions and financial optimizations.
The Ollion Solution
Our team designed and implemented a custom Azure cost reporting solution to bridge the visibility gap created by CloudHealth’s limitations.
Automated Data Acquisition
We automated the retrieval of cost and usage data directly from Azure through the built-in cost export functionality, ensuring that fresh data would be available on a scheduled basis.
Data Processing & Normalization
The raw Azure billing output was transformed, normalized, and structured into a format conducive to detailed analysis. This ensured consistency in reporting, aligning as closely as possible with AWS CUR-style outputs.
Interactive Visualization with QuickSight
We ingested the processed data into AWS QuickSight and built tailored dashboards and reports for the client. These dashboards delivered visibility into daily and monthly spend, resource-level costs, and breakdowns by service category and subscription. They also highlighted spending trends, anomalies, and forecasting signals, enabling CloudHealth-level cost insight for Azure within the client’s ecosystem.
The Business Benefit
This custom tool delivered tangible benefits to the client, including:
- Enhanced Financial Visibility: The client now sees Azure spend at the same level of detail as AWS, creating a unified cross-cloud view.
- Improved Cost Management: Daily cost transparency empowers the finance and operations teams to detect anomalies earlier and act on optimization opportunities.
- Streamlined Decision Making: Accessible dashboards provide stakeholders with on-demand access to spend trends across services and environments, supporting budget forecasting and strategic decision-making.
- Reduced Administrative Overhead: Manual invoice-based tracking and data analysis were eliminated, saving operational time and reducing errors.
While exact cost savings are still being calculated, the client has already reduced the time-to-insight from weeks (invoice cycle) to within one day of spend occurring, driving operational efficiency and financial control.
The one big thing
Unified cost visibility across AWS and Azure — delivered at the same level of depth, regardless of reseller limitations. This single development closed a critical governance gap and gave the client confidence they are managing their hybrid cloud with full financial transparency.
