Azure Backup Vault Bloat: The $2,700/Month Ghost in Our Cloud

I remember staring at the latest cloud bill, a knot forming in my stomach. Our Azure spending for backup services had slowly but steadily crept up over the past few months. It wasn't a sudden spike like an accidental GPU deployment, but a persistent, inexplicable bloat. We’re talking about an additional $2,700 hitting our monthly budget, solely for Azure Backup Vaults.

As a platform engineer, my job is to keep our cloud infrastructure lean and mean. We had strict policies in place: SQL database backups were to be retained for a maximum of 30 days, file share backups for even less. Yet, the numbers told a different story. Our storage consumption in the Backup Vaults was far beyond what our active datasets and intended retention policies should dictate.

It was a classic case of cloud cost creep – insidious, hard to pinpoint, and eroding our bottom line one gigabyte at a time. The worst part? No one on the team could immediately explain why. The initial setup had been correct, the configurations seemed fine on the surface, but something was clearly out of alignment.

Chasing Ghosts: Our Reactive Cleanup Efforts

Our first instinct was to react. We spun up scripts to identify old recovery points, manually checked individual backup policies across dozens of databases, and even considered reducing backup frequency – a move that would have compromised our disaster recovery posture. It was like trying to drain a bathtub with a leaky faucet: we were constantly bailing, but the water kept rising.

We’d set up Azure Monitor alerts for high storage usage, but by the time an alert fired, the costs had already accumulated. These alerts were good for identifying when a problem existed, but terrible at telling us why or how to prevent it proactively. The sheer volume of backups and recovery points made manual auditing a nightmare, and the risk of accidentally deleting a critical backup was too high.

Each database and its backup policy felt like a separate silo. Over time, with new engineers joining, old resources being deprecated, and policy changes, the "golden standard" retention of 30 days started to drift. Some resources were simply overlooked, while others had their policies inexplicably overridden during migrations or temporary adjustments that were never reverted.

EazyOps: Automated Policy Enforcement and Drift Detection

This painful discovery highlighted a critical gap in our FinOps strategy: we needed a way to continuously monitor and enforce our desired cloud policies, not just react when things went wrong. That's where EazyOps stepped in, transforming our approach to backup cost management.

EazyOps offers a powerful capability to define cloud policies as code and then continuously scan our Azure environment for compliance. For our Backup Vault problem, we leveraged EazyOps to:

• Automated Policy Auditing: EazyOps began proactively scanning all Azure Backup Vaults and their protected items, comparing their actual retention settings against our defined 30-day policy.
• Drift Detection & Flagging: Within hours of deployment, EazyOps flagged every instance where retention policies diverged from our organizational standards, including the notorious 1-year policy for our SQL database.
• Enforced Policy Resets: Crucially, EazyOps didn't just alert us; it allowed us to configure automatic enforcement. We set it to reset any non-compliant backup policy back to our approved 30-day standard, immediately initiating the cleanup of obsolete recovery points.

This wasn't just about finding the needle in the haystack; it was about preventing the haystack from forming in the first place. EazyOps provided the automated guardrails we needed to ensure our backup configurations adhered to our cost and compliance requirements, even as our cloud environment evolved.