That's a lot of wasted money. Add in the likelihood that these resources are not being tracked and spun up instances are often started and then forgotten about, organizations could easily experience months or years of extra costs.

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So what is the right approach for IT organizations to realize the benefits of cloud computing, but avoid the unfortunate cost effects outlined above? Here are five critical items to pay attention to:

1. Design: Your application must be designed so that the appropriate level of resources can be assigned and used. Think of this as a "just-in-time computing resource." This implies that the application must be designed as a collection of small. finely grained resources that can be added or subtracted as application load dictates.