As with any cloud provider, determining a cost-effective infrastructure is crucial to a successful Azure deployment. Ease of scalability gives way to rapidly increasing costs, both direct and indirect, if not carefully managed. Having the ability to control and predict cloud cost is key to any IT organization’s cloud success. When done correctly, cloud adoption should lead to significant cost savings and increased agility.

In this guide, we discuss four steps to controlling cost with Azure, while getting the best of all the available offerings and features. For organizations newly adopting cloud and those that have had a cloud-first approach for some time, proper planning, deployment, monitoring and optimization will ensure success in utilizing Azure.