Every solution is limited by budget and investors look for maximal ROI. The solution architect needs to consider cost-saving during architecture design. Cost should be optimized from pilot creation to solution implementation and launch. Cost optimization is a continuous effort and should be continuous process. Like any other constraint, cost-saving comes with a trade-off; it should make a point of determining whether other components such as the speed of delivery and performance are more critical.

Often, cost increases due to over-provision resources and overlooks the cost of procurement. The solution architect needs to plan optimal resources to avoid excessive underutilization. At the organization level, there should be an automated mechanism to detect ghost resources, which team members may create dev and test environments, and it may no longer be in use after completion of the implementation task. Often, those ghost resources go unnoticed and cause costs...