A Southern California college district operating across three campuses had migrated its infrastructure to Microsoft Azure with help from a third-party provider. The migration completed, but the disaster recovery deployment was left half-built, never configured, and never tested. It continued billing the district around $8,000 per month while delivering no protection, sitting inside a wider environment carrying significant unmanaged waste from the original move.
The combined disaster recovery rebuild and broader environment optimization reduced the district's monthly Azure bill by $12,000-$14,000, against a previous spend of approximately $42,000-$43,000 per month.
The non-functional DR setup, costing approximately $8,000 per month, was replaced with a fully configured and tested Azure Site Recovery solution running at around $2,200 per month.
For the first time, the district has disaster recovery that has been properly implemented, validated, and tested, with documented failover procedures the internal team can act on with confidence.
A resource-level audit of the entire Azure environment was completed before any changes were made, giving the district clear visibility over what was deployed, what it was costing, and what was actually in use.
Non-functional DR components were removed and replaced with a correctly configured Azure Site Recovery deployment. Protected workloads were validated, failover processes tested, and recovery procedures documented for the district's internal team.
Orphaned resources and unused test environments were decommissioned, virtual machines were rightsized, and Azure savings plans and reservations were applied to reduce on-demand billing.