Metered utilization, also known as pay-as-you-go, is the defining characteristic of Public cloud services that allows organizations to optimize operational costs by paying only for the computing resources they consume. This model is cost-effective for enterprises with large-scale, variable workloads, like a multinational enterprise's customer-facing application, as it avoids overprovisioning and minimizes waste. Rapid elasticity, while a beneficial feature for scaling resources according to demand, does not directly contribute to cost optimization. High availability is a common feature across many cloud models and ensures business continuity but is not unique to cost optimization. File synchronization is a feature for data consistency and does not pertain to cost.