CIO OPINION able to visualize your cloud cost and usage information . If you can ’ t see where spend occurs and the value that ’ s being returned to the business , how can you effectively manage spend or report a ROI ?
To gain full visibility , it is critical to have the ability to categorise all public cloud spend and usage . In reality , most organizations struggle to pull together this information from disparate sources and lack a solution to accurately aggregate them into a unified and actionable view . Today , as many as 63 % of companies need new IT capabilities and better financial management to optimize their costs and make better strategic decisions .
Craig Wishart , CIO at KPMG Australia , says using spreadsheets to manage costs is like solving one side of a Rubik ’ s Cube – it ’ s pretty easy to do with one colour . But with a methodological framework that provides a multi-dimensional view of financial data , business chiefs can complete the full puzzle and don ’ t find themselves taking their business apart after the fact .
Cloud cost management is complicated by the fact that cloud costs are variable in nature and charged in myriad ways . This has been further amplified by the accessibility of cloud services to line of business owners and teams , with technology spend no longer exclusively funnelled through IT departments .
That makes aggregating charges and understanding costs in a multi-cloud environment extremely challenging . And without that ability , it is nearly impossible to measure the effectiveness of procurement decisions and ultimately , the value cloud brings to the company .
Here ’ s a typical scenario of cloud cost management at play : a tool automatically normalises detailed information from the vendor billing files , provides capabilities to map spend to organizational constructs , and allocates container and shared service charges . CIOs subsequently receive a trove of accurate , centralized spending data to inform decision-making that improves the unit economics – and increases the business value – of cloud .
Empowering teams and driving accountability
Unfortunately , even with the right processes and tools in place , it takes cross-functional understanding , support and ownership to deliver an effective cloud financial management practice .
Infrastructure procurement decisions are typically dispersed across engineering and DevOps teams , so properly enabling them to take action is critical . This includes not only providing them with relevant insights and recommendations but also well
Successfully managing cloud spend relies almost exclusively on transparency .
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