A lot of teams talk about “getting more efficient in the cloud.” Fewer actually make it happen. The problem? Cloud optimization often feels like a moving target. There’s endless data, competing priorities, and no clear timeline.
That’s where a 90-day sprint comes in. It’s short enough to keep urgency high, but long enough to make real changes you can measure. In three months, you can go from unclear goals to actionable improvements without getting stuck in endless planning.
Phase 1: Audit (Days 1–30)
Goal: Get a clear picture of where you are right now.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure, but you also don’t need to measure everything. Start with the metrics that connect spend to value (like cost per workload or idle resource percentage). Then pull data from your cloud provider’s native reports (AWS, Azure, GCP) and see how it lines up with your internal usage records.
Steps to take:
- Identify the 4–5 metrics you’ll track for the entire sprint.
- Gather usage and cost reports from your cloud console.
- Tag or group resources by owner, project, or environment.
- Flag anomalies, such as resources running after hours or large spikes in cost.
Example:
One DevOps team found 15% of their monthly spend going to dev environments left running every weekend. Simply scheduling off-hours shutdowns saved thousands, without touching production workloads.
Stakeholders to involve:
- FinOps teams for cost breakdowns.
- CloudOps for technical validation.
- Team leads who can confirm resource ownership.
Phase 2: Alignment (Days 31–60)
Goal: Get finance, IT, and product teams all moving toward the same goal.
An audit is only useful if the results lead to action. This is where you turn findings into a focused plan.
Steps to take:
- Present audit results in plain, understandable language (not just charts and acronyms).
- Identify your top priorities, like cutting on-demand costs, increasing reserved instance coverage, or rightsizing storage.
- Assign an owner for each priority so progress doesn’t stall.
- Define what success will look like after 90 days.
Example:
By aligning finance and IT around reserved instance usage, one company increased their coverage from 50% to 75% in just a month, cutting costs without risking uptime.
Stakeholders to involve:
- IT leads who understand technical feasibility.
- Finance teams to verify ROI.
- Product managers to avoid project delivery delays.
Phase 3: Execution (Days 61–90)
Goal: Put changes into action and keep tracking.
This is where your sprint shifts from strategy to results. Small wins keep the team motivated, and the bigger changes will pay off over time.
Steps to take:
- Quick wins first: Shut down idle resources, fix tagging gaps, adjust instance sizes.
- Longer-term fixes: Implement automation for scaling, renegotiate contracts, migrate to more cost-efficient services.
- Track metrics weekly and compare them to your Day 1 baseline.
- Let everyone know when there’s a progress, even if it’s small. It shows the team that the work is paying off.
Example:
A cloud ops team reduced their idle resource percentage from 12% to under 4% in 90 days, freeing budget for new product features without increasing total spend.
Tools that can help:
- Native: AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Advisor, GCP Recommendations.
- External: CloudHealth, Apptio Cloudability.
- Manual: Tagging policies + BI dashboards.
Pitfalls to Avoid
- Trying to fix everything in 90 days
If you take on too much at once, you’ll spread your team’s energy everywhere and get stuck halfway. It’s better to focus on a few high-impact areas first so you can actually see results and finish strong.
- Leaving finance and product out of the conversation
Cloud efficiency isn’t just an IT thing. Finance can help track the real cost impact, and product can spot risks to customer experience. Without them, you might optimize the wrong things.
- Skipping before-and-after measurements
Without knowing where you started, it’s hard to tell if your changes worked. Tracking the “before” makes it easy to show progress and keep the team motivated.
Ready to Start Your 90-Day Sprint?
Cloud efficiency doesn’t happen by coincidence. It happens when you set a goal, rally the right people, and track the right numbers. A 90-day sprint gives you the structure to do exactly that.
If you’re ready to start, here are your next steps:
- Share: This blog with your team to start the conversation.
- Talk to us: Plan your first sprint with a Wowrack consultant.
You don’t need everything figured out right now. Just start on Day 1, then keep building step by step.
