Cloud spend can grow quietly. For Kenyan SMEs the combination of currency exposure, right-sizing gaps and unused resources often produces bills that feel disconnected from actual value.

This article outlines ten practical strategies we see working in East African environments:

1. Right-size virtual machines on a monthly cadence.
2. Use Azure Reservations or Savings Plans for steady workloads.
3. Turn off non-production environments outside business hours.
4. Adopt auto-shutdown and auto-start schedules.
5. Review orphaned disks and public IPs.
6. Prefer serverless or container options where traffic is bursty.
7. Monitor with budgets and action groups in KES terms.
8. Consolidate logging and observability costs.
9. Challenge data-egress assumptions.
10. Revisit architecture decisions every quarter.

None of these require exotic tooling. They require discipline and a clear owner for cloud cost.

At Fox Height we treat cost visibility as a first-class operational concern alongside security and uptime.