Invest in building strong Cloud Financial Management and Cost Optimization capabilities. Dedicate time and resources to increase your knowledge, understanding, skills, programs, and processes of how cloud native capabilities impact your operations and can be leveraged in your organization.

Pay only for the computing resources that you require and increase or decrease usage depending on business requirements.  Gone are the days of complex forecasting and purchasing extra capacity you may (or may not) need in the future.  Shut down resources like development and test environments when not in use.

Focus on business objectives and measure the business output of the workload and the costs associated with delivering it. Use these metrics to make intelligent investments in increasing or reducing costs.

Take advantage of AWS’ core data center and hardware infrastructure.  Don’t sink massive amounts of capital into facilities, power management, networking, racks, servers and storage equipment. Stop using key team members to maintain operating systems and patching.  Move up the technology stack as far as it makes business sense so you are focused on what differentiates your business and drives value to your customers.

Increase your IT financial transparency to accurately identify the usage and cost of systems, which then allows transparent attribution of IT costs to individual workload owners. Improve your ability to accurately measure Return on Investment (ROI) and business owners the opportunity to optimize their resources and reduce costs.