Spend that only goes one way
Consumption is reviewed at renewal rather than on a cycle, and nothing is ever switched off, because the person who would know whether it is still needed has left.
Microsoft
Platform expertise / Microsoft Azure
The migration was the easy part.
Most Azure estates we are asked to look at were migrated competently and then left to accumulate. Day two is where cost, drift, resilience and access position are actually decided — and it is the part that rarely had an owner. Aevis operates that.
Microsoft Azure is third-party software and infrastructure selected and licensed by the client. Aevis provides advisory, engineering and operational services around the client’s subscriptions, and takes no margin on consumption.
Cloud operating layer
Landed · governed · measured- Platform
- Microsoft Azure
- Starting point
- Estate, cost and posture review
- Commercial model
- Project, migration, managed or co-managed
Platform fit
Cloud makes decisions cheap to take and expensive to leave.
Anyone with rights can create a resource in a minute. Nothing in the platform requires them to say why, to attribute the cost, or to remove it afterwards — and by year three that is the estate.
An estate that no longer matches its design
Resources were created through the portal during incidents and never reconciled with the templates. What is deployed and what is described have quietly diverged.
Resilience that has never been tested
Availability zones and paired regions are in the architecture diagram. No failover has been performed, so what actually happens is unknown.
Our role is to make the estate governed, operable and accountable in your environment — not to sell an Aevis software product or to earn on your consumption.
Product landscape
Where Azure carries the estate.
We shape the engagement around the services your workloads actually use. Scope, entitlements and regional availability always depend on your subscriptions and agreements.
Compute
Compute and containers
Virtual machines, scale sets, App Service and Kubernetes — with the patching and capacity position underneath.
- Virtual machines
- App Service
- Azure Kubernetes Service
Network
Networking and connectivity
Virtual networks, hybrid connectivity, routing and the firewall position between them.
- Hub and spoke
- ExpressRoute and VPN
- Azure Firewall
Data
Data platform
Managed databases, storage and analytics, including backup and the recovery objectives attached.
- Azure SQL
- Storage accounts
- Databricks and Fabric
Identity
Identity and access
Entra ID, role assignment, privileged access and the standing permissions nobody reviewed.
- RBAC design
- Privileged Identity Management
- Managed identities
Governance
Governance and policy
Management groups, Azure Policy, tagging and the guardrails that make self-service safe.
- Management group design
- Azure Policy
- Tagging standard
Operations
Monitoring and operations
Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, alerting designed around service impact, and update management.
- Azure Monitor
- Log Analytics
- Update Manager
Aevis capabilities
From a landed estate to an operated one.
Engage us for a focused intervention or an end-to-end programme. We work within your subscription, security and regulatory constraints.
Estate and cost review
Establish what exists, what it costs, what it is for, and which of those three nobody can currently answer.
- Resource inventory and ownership
- Cost attribution by workload
- Idle and orphaned resource identification
Landing zone and guardrails
Subscription structure, policy, network and identity designed so that self-service stays safe rather than being withdrawn.
- Management group and subscription design
- Policy and tagging enforcement
- Hub network and connectivity
Migration and modernisation
Workloads moved by dependency wave with the target operating cost modelled before the move rather than after it.
- Dependency-sequenced waves
- Target cost modelling
- Rollback defined per wave
Infrastructure as code
The estate described in code and reconciled against it, so drift becomes a reported number rather than a discovery.
- Bicep or Terraform module design
- Pipeline and environment promotion
- Drift detection and reconciliation
Day-two operations
Monitoring designed from the service down, patch and update cycles, backup with tested restores, and incident response.
- Service-impact monitoring
- Update rings and maintenance windows
- Restore testing on a cycle
Cost and resilience optimisation
Consumption reviewed against the workload behind it, and resilience claims tested rather than asserted.
- Rightsizing and commitment review
- Idle resource retirement
- Failover exercises against stated objectives
AI platform engineering
The demo is not the hard part. Running it is.
Retrieval quality, evaluation, observability, identity and cost are what decide whether an Azure AI workload survives contact with production. We build for those from the start rather than retrofitting them after a successful pilot.
Microsoft Foundry and model services
- Model selection against task and cost
- Deployment, quota and region planning
- Prompt and orchestration patterns
- Version and rollback strategy
Retrieval and enterprise search
- Index design over approved sources
- Chunking, embedding and ranking strategy
- Permission-trimmed retrieval
- Citation and grounding verification
Agent engineering
- Tool and action definition
- Policy-constrained execution
- Approval gates and exception routing
- State, memory and audit design
Evaluation and observability
- Test sets and accuracy criteria before release
- Regression runs on every change
- Tracing, latency and failure analysis
- Drift and quality monitoring in production
Security and cost management
- Identity, network and data-residency design
- Prompt-injection and exfiltration controls
- Token and inference cost baselining
- Budget alerting and right-sizing
What stays human
Release approval, risk acceptance and any decision to let an agent write to a production system of record are human decisions, recorded by the application that took them.
How value is measured
- Evaluation pass rate against the agreed test set
- Retrieval precision and citation accuracy
- Task completion and human fallback rate
- Latency and cost per completed task
- Guardrail trigger rate
- Production incident and rollback frequency
Entitlement
Model availability, region, quota, data residency and commercial terms depend on the client’s Azure subscription and Microsoft agreement. Aevis builds against the client’s tenant and does not resell capacity.
Connected architecture
Guardrails, so self-service can survive.
The alternative to guardrails is not freedom; it is a change-approval queue. A well-designed landing zone lets teams move quickly inside boundaries that hold without a person checking each request.
Workloads
Applications, data and the environments each team deploys into.
Platform services
Shared network, identity, monitoring, backup and secret management the workloads consume.
Governance plane
Management groups, policy, role assignment, tagging and cost attribution.
Enterprise landscape
On-premises estate, other clouds, SaaS platforms and the connectivity between them.
Architecture boundaryService availability, regional presence, commitment options and pricing depend on the client’s subscriptions and agreements with Microsoft. We validate these before committing to a design.
Delivery approach
A controlled path from estate to operating standard.
Each stage has a decision, an accountable owner and an observable output. The sequence supports a first landing zone, a migration programme or the recovery of an estate that grew without one.
Align
Define objectives, sponsors, regulatory constraints, cost envelope and measures.
Engagement briefDiscover
Inventory resources, attribute cost, map dependencies and identify ownership gaps.
Estate baseline with cost attributionDesign
Agree subscription structure, policy set, network, identity model and tagging standard.
Landing zone designConfigure
Implement as code with policy enforced, and reconcile the existing estate against it.
Landing zone with a drift reportValidate
Test access paths, failover against stated objectives, restores and monitoring coverage.
Acceptance evidence including a failover resultLaunch
Transition workloads and support teams, with escalation tested under real conditions.
Signed transition acceptanceImprove
Review consumption, drift, resilience and platform currency on a fixed cadence.
Improvement backlog and a cost trend
Use cases
Start where the estate is costing you something.
The best starting point is a specific bill or a specific exposure — not an ambition to "sort out the cloud".
Bring consumption back under review
Attribute cost to workloads and owners, then retire what nobody can justify — with the decision recorded.
Designed outcomeSpend attributable and reviewable
Retrofit guardrails to a grown estate
Apply policy, tagging and subscription structure to an estate that was built before any of it existed.
Designed outcomeSelf-service that stays safe
Test the resilience you already paid for
Exercise failover against stated recovery objectives and correct what the exercise finds.
Designed outcomeA demonstrated recovery position
Close the gap between code and estate
Reconcile deployed resources against the templates so drift becomes a number rather than a surprise.
Designed outcomeA reported drift position
Remove standing privilege
Replace permanent elevated access with just-in-time elevation and scheduled recertification.
Designed outcomeElevated access that expires
Move the workloads still on-premises
Sequence the remaining estate by dependency, with operating cost modelled before each wave.
Designed outcomeMigration with a known cost position
Ways to engage
Support matched to the stage you are in.
A cloud programme should not force a single commercial model. We define the responsibility boundary before work begins.
Estate and cost review
Best forEstablishing where you actually stand
A bounded assessment of inventory, cost attribution, governance, resilience and access position, ending in a prioritised remediation sequence.
Landing zone programme
Best forBuilding or retrofitting the foundation
A governed engagement covering subscription structure, policy, network, identity and the code that maintains all four.
Managed cloud operations
Best forOngoing day-two responsibility
Monitoring, patching, backup and restore testing, drift control, incident response and consumption review against agreed service levels.
Co-managed capability
Best forInternal teams needing depth or cover
Aevis works inside your operating model against a documented split — typically out-of-hours cover or a specific platform layer.
Value & measurement
Measure the estate, not the number of resources deployed.
Targets are set from a client baseline. We do not publish universal savings claims, because results depend on starting position, workload profile, commitment position and decisions outside the platform.
Cost position
Spend attributed to workloads, idle resource, and commitment coverage against use
Governance position
Policy compliance, tagging completeness and drift against declared infrastructure
Resilience position
Recovery objectives tested, restore results and failover exercise outcomes
Access position
Standing privileged assignments, recertification currency and elevation events
Measure from a baseline
At discovery we agree the baseline, the measurement owner and the review cadence. That makes value an operating conversation rather than a number attached after delivery.
Platform governance
Build for the estate you will have in three years.
Governance protects pace. Clear guardrails let teams make more decisions safely, without turning the subscription into a collection of exceptions nobody can reason about.
Subscription and policy structure
Management groups and policy assignments that make the safe path the easy one, rather than relying on review.
Infrastructure as code
The estate declared, versioned and reconciled, so a change has a reviewer and drift has a number.
Cost attribution and review
Tagging enforced at creation, cost attributed to owners, and a review cadence with somebody empowered to act.
Access and privilege
Role design, just-in-time elevation, separation of duties and recertification carried as scheduled work.
Resilience and recovery
Objectives stated per workload and tested against, with the results reported rather than assumed.
Knowledge ownership
Decisions, runbooks and the exception register documented for the people who inherit them.
Why Aevis
Platform expertise with an operator’s perspective.
We approach Azure as an estate somebody has to run at three in the morning. The work is designed to survive handover, normal service operations and the platform’s own release cadence.
Day two is the engagement
Migration is well served by the market. What is usually missing is the operating model afterwards — cost, drift, resilience and access — and that is where we start.
No margin on your consumption
Azure is contracted between you and Microsoft. An operations partner earning on spend is being asked to recommend switching things off while holding a reason not to.
Resilience tested, not asserted
Failover and restore are exercised against stated objectives and the results appear in the service review, including the ones that did not go to plan.
An estate you can inherit
Infrastructure as code, runbooks and the exception register are deliverables, which is what makes us replaceable and the advice trustworthy.
Relationship clarityAevis does not claim ownership of Microsoft products and this page does not state or imply a certified partnership. Product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.
Testimonials
In their words.
Each testimonial is tied to the service it refers to, so service pages can draw the relevant one automatically.
The change we noticed first was not technical. It was that there was finally one person to call, and that person already knew the history of the problem.
Placeholder NameHead of IT OperationsNorthvale BankManaged Services They rebuilt the service catalogue around how our teams actually work rather than how the platform was shipped. Adoption stopped being an argument.
Placeholder NameDirector, Service ManagementHalden InsuranceIT Service Management We had the security tooling before Aevis arrived. What we did not have was anybody turning what it produced into decisions.
Placeholder NameChief Information Security OfficerCerulean HealthCybersecurity
Frequently asked questions
Questions before a cloud conversation.
A clear scope starts with clear boundaries.
Do you resell Azure or take a margin on consumption?
No to both. Azure is contracted between you and Microsoft or your chosen agreement partner. We hold no margin in your spend, deliberately — it is the only way the advice to switch something off can be trusted, and it is worth checking for in any competing proposal.
Can you work with an estate we already migrated?
Yes, and that is most of this work. An engagement usually begins with a review covering inventory, cost attribution, governance, resilience and access position. Retrofitting guardrails to a grown estate is a well-understood exercise and rarely requires rebuilding anything.
What if we also run AWS or on-premises?
Most estates we operate are hybrid or multi-cloud for years rather than months. The connectivity and identity boundary is a design decision we make explicitly, and our managed services practice runs the non-Azure parts under the same governance model.
How much will this save us?
We will not name a figure before seeing the estate, and we would be suspicious of anyone who does. Cost work is baselined at discovery against attributed spend, and the review reports what was actioned rather than what was identified — the gap between those two is where most cost programmes fail.
Does this include security monitoring?
Posture, policy, access design and remediation are here. Monitoring the estate for threats, triaging what that produces and responding to a security incident is our Cybersecurity practice. Cloud operations without security operations is a normal and complete engagement.
Can Aevis operate the estate afterwards?
Yes. Ongoing scope can include monitoring, patching, backup and restore testing, drift control, incident response and consumption review, with responsibilities agreed up front. It is a separate line in the agreement so it stays a choice rather than a consequence of the build.
Start a conversation
Start with what the estate costs and what it is for.
Tell us what is running, what it costs and which of those two you can currently attribute to a workload. We will shape the first conversation around your estate, not around a reference architecture.
- Response
- One working day, Monday to Friday