Cloud Cost Optimization Deck

About this template

Twelve slides that ask for approval to cut a bill

This deck takes a cloud invoice apart and asks for approval on how much comes off it and how. It is not a migration plan: nothing moves to a new platform, it takes money out of what already runs. That is why the bill and the target sit on the same slide from the start, and why every option on slide 8 carries an amount. The numbers are the argument, so get the figures right rather than lengthening the sentences.

Six agenda lines, three body pairs

Slide 2 runs the bill and the savings target, where the waste is, ways to cut, before the cuts and after, key metrics, trend analysis. The first three carry a divider and a body slide across slides 3 to 8, line 04 is the comparison on slide 9, and slides 10 and 11 are the cards and bars. A rollout order by week and the guardrails that stop the bill climbing back have no pair of their own, so duplicate slides 7 and 8 for each and extend the agenda.

The three body slides

1. The bill and the savings target: “KRW 184m billed this month”, “Compute 52% – storage 21% – transfer 14%”, “KRW 36.5m a month cut within 6 weeks”. Current spend and target sitting on one slide is the spine of the deck.
2. Where the waste is: “412GB of unattached disks”, “68 dev servers left on overnight”, “Top 5 accounts are 71% of the bill”. Give each item a quantity and a monthly amount; a quantity alone does not size the prize.
3. Ways to cut: “KRW 21m a month from committed-use purchase”, “KRW 9.4m a month from nightly shutdown”, “KRW 6.1m a month from storage tiering”. The three add to KRW 36.5m, exactly the target on slide 4, so if you change one option the target has to move with it. Committed-use purchase turns into a loss if usage falls, so keep a risk beside it rather than listing it as pure savings.

The metric cards and the trend bars

Slide 10 holds “Monthly bill (KRW 10k)” 18,400, “Savings target (KRW 10k)” 3,650, “Reduction (%)” 20 and “Rollout window (wks)” 6. The first two cards are denominated in units of ten thousand won, so they read as KRW 184m and KRW 36.5m and match slide 4 exactly. Divide 3,650 by 18,400 and you get the 20 on the third card, so changing the bill or the target forces the rate to be recomputed. Slide 11 falls 184, 178, 162, 148 across Jan to Apr in millions of won, so the first bar is the same money as the first card. Change the denomination and you change cards and bars together, rewriting the “Unit: index” label as a currency unit. The sample-values footnote has to go before this becomes an approval document.

The comparison slide

Slide 9 sets “Today’s bill” against “6 weeks on”. “Idle resources billed in full” faces “Untagged resources cannot be created”, “Dev environments run 24 hours a day” faces “Nights and weekends shut down automatically”, and “Everything paid at list price” faces “Committed-use purchase lowers unit rates”. Each right-hand line is a control someone has to own, so edit the pairs together or the savings lose their mechanism.

Where the numbers come from

A total from the billing console will not fill this deck. Pull the same month three ways before you start: by service for the compute, storage and transfer split, by account to show how much the top few carry, by tag to expose resources with no owner. In a month with credits applied the savings look inflated, so note the list-price figure alongside, and if the contract settles in another currency, state the rate you used.

What goes wrong

• Leading with 20% and leaving out the base. Nobody can approve a percentage without knowing what it is a percentage of.
• Booking committed-use purchase as savings with no downside noted. It is a commitment, and it becomes a loss the moment usage drops.
• Cutting without the guardrails. The closing line is “What we cut, we keep cut” – with no tagging rule and no budget alert, the bill is back inside six months.