Azure Infrastructure Consulting to Drive 20% Cloud Cost Savings for a Luxury Travel Agency

About Our Client

The Client is an award-winning luxury travel agency with over 20 years in business, offering boutique holiday accommodations and experiences across the Mediterranean.

High-End Travel Platform Needed an Expert Review of Its Cloud Infrastructure

The Client runs an Azure-based online platform where travelers can discover, compare, and book luxury holidays. To keep the platform reliable and competitive, the Client regularly reviews its technology stack and launches engineering initiatives to improve the platform's performance and user experience.

As part of this review cycle, the Client set out to strengthen its backup and recovery approach and optimize Azure infrastructure spend. For this initiative, the Client turned to ScienceSoft, a Microsoft partner with strong Azure expertise.

Azure Review Focused on Cost Savings and Backup Options

To enable the assessment of the existing Azure infrastructure, the Client granted ScienceSoft read-only access via an Azure AD role. ScienceSoft then compiled an inventory of more than 170 Azure resources across the environment.

Using Azure Monitor, ScienceSoft collected performance metrics across key services, including App Services, Storage Accounts, App Service Plans, Virtual Machines (VMs), and an Azure SQL Managed Instance. Based on this telemetry and the resource inventory, ScienceSoft identified common optimization and governance gaps, including overprovisioned workloads, inconsistent or missing tagging, and overly broad network access controls. These findings formed the basis for the subsequent recommendations.

To support the Client’s goal of verifying backup availability and defining suitable protection options for key workloads, ScienceSoft recommended the following backup measures:

• VM-level protection using Azure Backup, covering operating systems, data disks, and configurations with defined backup schedules and retention policies.
• Automated backups for Azure App Services, with flexible scheduling and retention options.
• Protection of Azure file shares through Azure Backup or snapshots to support point-in-time recovery.
• Workload-aware protection for databases hosted on virtual machines, using Azure Backup and native mechanisms such as SQL Server backups to Azure storage.
• Built-in automated backups for Azure SQL Managed Instance, with configurable retention options and support for long-term retention where required.

Next, ScienceSoft prepared an Azure cost optimization analysis with usage-aware recommendations and estimated savings. ScienceSoft suggested replacing overprovisioned resources with more appropriate VM sizes and configurations based on actual CPU and memory utilization. To ensure cost reductions wouldn’t compromising reliability, ScienceSoft differentiated between dynamic workloads that could safely move to flexible Azure Savings Plans and stable, performance-sensitive components that required reserved capacity for virtual machines and App Service Plans. Together, these measures (right-sized resources, Savings Plans, and reserved instances) represented annual savings potential equivalent to over 20% of the Client's current Azure spend.

ScienceSoft also recommended optimizing database backup patterns (e.g., replacing daily full backups with differential or incremental backups) to reduce storage and processing costs without affecting RPO (recovery point objectives).

In addition, ScienceSoft recommended improving cloud governance by implementing consistent resource tagging and grouping, which would make cost tracking and reporting more transparent. From a security perspective, ScienceSoft reviewed Network Security Group (NSG) configurations and recommended tightening inbound rules, limiting access to management ports, and funneling external traffic through Azure Front Door or Application Gateway to reduce exposure to misconfiguration risks.

At the end of the engagement, ScienceSoft delivered the full resource inventory, supporting performance metrics, and a consolidated report with practical recommendations for backup implementation, cost optimization, and improved governance and security.

Data-Driven Insight Into Backup Planning, Cost Optimization, Governance, and Security

By engaging ScienceSoft’s Azure team to assess its cloud environment supporting a premium travel web platform, the Client gained a clear, evidence-based roadmap of how to improve resilience, governance, security, and cost efficiency. ScienceSoft delivered a data-rich infrastructure review report with a full resource inventory, performance and cost analysis, and practical recommendations for backup and recovery across key workloads. The proposed optimization measures outlined a path to over 20% annual Azure savings potential while maintaining performance and RPO.

Technologies and Tools

Azure Monitor, Azure Application Insights, Azure Resource Manager, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Network Watcher, Azure Reservations, Azure Savings Plans, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Network Security Group.