There are five fundamental design concepts for cloud cost optimization:

1. Implement Cloud Financial Management : To succeed financially and accelerate business value realization in the cloud, you need to invest in cloud financial management (CFM)/cost optimization. This requires dedicating time and resources to build capability in this new domain of technology and usage management. CFM/cost optimization should be treated similarly to your security or operational excellence capabilities, with a focus on knowledge building, programs, resources, and processes to become a cost-efficient organization.

2. Switch To a Consumption-Based Pricing Model : Pay only for the computing resources you need, and scale your usage up or down based on business requirements, rather than relying on complex forecasting. For example, development and test environments are typically only used for eight hours a day during the work week. By stopping these resources when they’re not in use, you could save up to 75% (40 hours versus 168 hours).

3. Assess Resource Utilization : Track the business value delivered by the workload and the costs associated with it. Use this data to measure the impact of your efforts to increase output and reduce costs.

4. Focus On Your Core Competencies And Outsource The Rest : DynamoCloud handles the tedious and time-consuming tasks of data center operations, such as racking, stacking, and powering servers. It also removes the burden of managing operating systems and applications with managed services. This frees you up to focus on your customers and business projects, rather than on IT infrastructure.

5. Identify and Categorize Expenses : The cloud simplifies the accurate tracking of system usage and costs, enabling transparent attribution of IT costs to individual workload owners. This facilitates ROI measurement and provides workload owners with the opportunity to optimize their resources and reduce costs.