GSK: Optimising Azure Costs and Provisioning Standard Services with Bicep

Overview

Cost control and consistency at enterprise scale

GSK is a global biopharma company. Its teams use Microsoft Azure for a wide range of workloads, in a regulated environment where consistency, security and control matter.

As Azure use grew, so did the challenge of managing it. Resources were provisioned in different ways by different teams, some were larger than they needed to be, and spend was harder to predict and attribute.

Konsolute reviewed and optimised GSK's Azure costs, then addressed the root cause by implementing a service catalogue. Teams provision predefined services built as Bicep templates, so new infrastructure follows approved patterns for configuration, security, tagging and sizing.

The challenge

Growth without standardisation drives cost

When every team provisions cloud resources its own way, costs tend to rise. Resources are oversized as a precaution, left running after they are needed and configured inconsistently, which makes them harder to manage, secure and charge back.

Optimising existing spend helps, but without changing how resources are created, the same problems return. GSK needed both: savings from the current estate and a better way to provision new services.

Any solution also had to support the governance expected in a regulated life sciences organisation, with repeatable, reviewable deployments.

GSK needed to:

Our approach

Optimise today, standardise for tomorrow

We tackled cost in two ways: reducing waste in the current estate, and changing how new services are provisioned so that waste is not reintroduced.

Cost review and optimisation. Konsolute analysed GSK's Azure consumption to identify where spend could be reduced. Recommendations covered right-sizing over-provisioned resources, removing idle or orphaned resources and using appropriate pricing options for predictable workloads.

Service catalogue design. We worked with GSK to identify the infrastructure services teams requested most often. Each was defined as a standard offering with agreed configuration, security settings, sizing options and tagging.

Infrastructure as code with Bicep. Each catalogue service was built as a Bicep template. Bicep makes deployments declarative, repeatable and version-controlled, so every instance of a service is deployed in the same, approved way.

Governance built in. Templates apply security baselines and tagging automatically, so resources are compliant and attributable from the moment they are created. Changes to templates are reviewed and versioned like any other code.

Enablement. We documented the catalogue and supported GSK's teams in adopting it, so provisioning through approved services became the normal way to get infrastructure.

Result

Lower costs and a standard way to provision

GSK reduced spend across its existing Azure estate through right-sizing, clean-up and better use of pricing options.

The service catalogue gives teams a quick, consistent way to provision predefined services. Because each service is built with Bicep, deployments are repeatable, version-controlled and aligned with approved patterns for security, tagging and sizing.

With governance built into provisioning, new resources start out compliant and attributable, helping GSK keep costs under control as its use of Azure grows.