SoftwareOne case study

A global law firm takes control of its Azure cloud costs

With cloud costs spread across a vast Azure estate, a global law firm asked SoftwareOne for transparency and a clear path to optimization, fast.

Modern law firms run on the cloud, and the bill that comes with it can be just as complex as the work it supports. A global law firm with more than 5,000 employees operated a large Azure estate behind its legal practice management platforms, document repositories, analytics, security tooling, and business-critical applications. Its annual cloud consumption ran into the millions, with significant Marketplace and SaaS costs on top, spread across hundreds of subscriptions, reservations, and platform services. The firm wanted clear visibility into where the money was going, the optimization opportunities hiding in the detail, and a sensible set of FinOps governance priorities, and it wanted all of that quickly, without a long, heavy consulting engagement.

Six-figure savings opportunities surfaced
The assessment identified multiple six-figure annual optimization opportunities across storage, compute commitments, telemetry ingestion, and cloud governance.
Transparency over a complex estate
Clear visibility and AI-driven insights into consumption across hundreds of subscriptions, reservations, and platform services.
FinOps priorities, without the long engagement
Long-term FinOps governance priorities defined quickly, through a focused assessment rather than a lengthy consulting project.

Client: A global law firm with more than 5,000 employees
Industry: Professional services
Platform: Azure Cloud
Services: FinOps Advisory Services, Azure Cost Optimization Assessment, Cloud Financial Management

Seeing clearly across a vast, complex Azure estate

The firm's Azure estate was substantial and varied. It supported legal practice management platforms, document repositories, analytics workloads, security tooling, and a range of business-critical applications, the kind of environment a modern global firm depends on every day.

With that scale came complexity. Annual cloud consumption ran into the millions, with significant Marketplace and SaaS costs on top. The estate spanned hundreds of subscriptions, reservations, and platform services, and the cost drivers reached across storage, compute, networking, databases, and AI services. In an environment like this, it is easy for spend to grow faster than understanding, and for savings to sit hidden in the detail.

What the firm wanted was clarity: a clear view of its consumption patterns, the optimization opportunities worth pursuing, and a set of long-term FinOps governance priorities to guide it. Just as important, it did not want a long, heavy consulting engagement to get there. It needed answers it could act on, quickly.

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A focused FinOps assessment, with AI-driven insight

SoftwareOne brought the firm transparency and AI-driven insights into its Azure estate through a focused engagement, drawing on its FinOps Advisory Services, an Azure Cost Optimization Assessment, and Cloud Financial Management. Rather than a drawn-out consulting project, the work was designed to deliver clear, actionable findings quickly.

The assessment looked across the full picture: consumption patterns, the major cost drivers spanning storage, compute, networking, databases, and AI services, and the hundreds of subscriptions, reservations, and platform services that made up the estate. AI-driven analysis helped cut through that complexity, turning a sprawling environment into insights the firm could understand and act on.

From there, SoftwareOne identified where real savings sat, surfacing multiple six-figure annual optimization opportunities across storage, compute commitments, telemetry ingestion, and cloud governance processes. Alongside the opportunities, it set out long-term FinOps governance priorities, so the firm had not just a list of quick wins but a direction for managing cloud cost over time.

The result was the clarity the firm asked for, delivered at pace and without the burden of a lengthy engagement.

Bring transparency to your cloud costs

Talk to our FinOps experts about gaining clear visibility into your Azure estate, surfacing optimization opportunities, and setting governance priorities, without a lengthy engagement.

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Bring transparency to your cloud costs

Talk to our FinOps experts about gaining clear visibility into your Azure estate, surfacing optimization opportunities, and setting governance priorities, without a lengthy engagement.

The speed mattered as much as the substance. By delivering the work as a focused assessment rather than an open-ended consulting project, SoftwareOne gave the firm answers it could use straight away. The combination of FinOps expertise and AI-driven analysis meant the findings were both practical and grounded in the firm's actual consumption, not generic best practice. The firm came away knowing where its money was going, where it could save, and how to keep cloud cost under control as its estate evolves.

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Clear visibility, and savings worth pursuing

The firm moved from a complex, hard-to-read Azure estate to a clear, well-understood picture of its cloud cost. With transparency and AI-driven insights across its consumption, it could finally see where spend was concentrated and where it was being wasted.

The assessment surfaced multiple six-figure annual optimization opportunities, spread across storage, compute commitments, telemetry ingestion, and cloud governance processes. These were concrete, actionable opportunities the firm could pursue, not vague suggestions. Alongside them, a set of long-term FinOps governance priorities gave the firm a way to keep its cloud cost under control well beyond the engagement.

Perhaps most valuable was how it was achieved. The firm got the clarity and direction it needed quickly, through a focused assessment rather than a lengthy, expensive consulting project. For a busy global firm, that combination of speed, depth, and practical, six-figure opportunities is exactly what good FinOps advice should deliver.

Cloud cost is not a one-time problem, and the firm now has both the insight and the governance priorities to manage it for the long term. What began as a request for transparency became a clear, practical plan: a sharper view of the estate, a set of six-figure opportunities to pursue, and a FinOps direction to follow as the cloud environment grows and changes.