Are you wondering why your Public Cloud costs are a black box and how you can change that to gain the insight you need to govern your Public Cloud spend properly?
Many companies rely on their financial reporting based on accountancy rules to manage their business. But accounting reporting or financial reporting does not fulfill the reporting needs of Business Management.
After reading this article, you will know
- Why it is often hard to get these insights.
- What you can do to Govern your (Public) Cloud Costs and get the insights you need.
The Cloud Cost and Commerce reporting needs of the business
To stay competitive and relevant many companies are embracing digitalisation. With that, they change the way they work, transform how customers and the company engage and interact, and enable new (digital) revenue streams. To speed up this process, companies use (Public) Cloud as it offers easy to deploy resources that can swiftly be changed when needed.
With that change comes the need for a different kind of reporting that supports the ever-changing (Public) Cloud spend and its impact on the companies financial performance. Having day-to-day insight into how Cloud costs, digital revenue streams, and margins are split by service, departments, customers, or projects is crucial for a company’s success.
Financial Cost reporting vs Business Cloud Governance
Financial reporting is compliance focused, follows a standardized reporting method, and aggregates information: this aggregated information often lacks the needed insights for business management.
Business management struggles to get the insights they need to make data-backed decisions in a company that uses accounting reporting as their source of business information. When requesting the needed data, they are often told:
- Our reporting system doesn’t provide that level of cloud cost detail.
- That is not how we report things.
- Introducing a new ledger code for every Public Cloud service into our reporting is
- just too time-consuming.
- We report Cloud Cost under code x.
The result is that management manages the business, which relies heavily on the quickly changing Public Cloud, based on high-level financial figures. If the business does well (while nobody knows exactly why), there is little incentive to set up a more detailed Cloud cost management reporting system.
Not having a Cloud Management reporting system is costing you money
When more detailed information is needed to make data-backed business decisions, it is often time-consuming, done in (Local) Excel files and left to dust on the (virtual) shelf after the decision is made. And the whole process starts again when the subsequent request from management comes for detailed information.
While financial reporting is compulsory, management reporting is optional, but it is crucial to keep ahead of the competition and run a profitable and sustainable business. Management shouldn’t have barriers to access insights needed to drive the business.
You need your management to be able to make essential business decisions backed up by solid data.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Each industry has its own set of key performance indicators. As management, you should know what they are for your industry. Typical KPIs are sales figures, cost and margin and not just on a high level but divided by customers, departments or services.
Getting the reports you actually need will save time and make you money. If you are receiving reports that aren’t directly impacting the business’s growth potential, you miss out on opportunities to increase profits.
Key performance indicators are a great way to analyse data and provide strategic direction to improve your business’s profitability. You’ll never understand how your business performs without knowing how to keep score with your business.
In-depth (public) cloud cost and commerce reports
With your KPIs at your disposal, you should make sure that they are not derived from aggregated data. As mentioned, aggregated data lacks the ability for you to drill down and get the Insights you need.
Instead of requesting a more detailed report from finance, a manager should be able to configure his or her report with the detail level required and share this with all stakeholders. And no, this should not be a fault-prone personal Excel file shared via OneDrive.
Static IT cost reporting vs the flexible cloud cost and commerce reporting
Costs for conventional IT are relatively stable. The purchasing department controls purchases, and to buy a new server, an employee would need a purchase number. Compare this to the open-end contracts companies now have with their cloud providers where employees can scale their IT environment up and down when needed, and it is clear that conventional reporting tools do not fit.
Combine this with the proprietary billing systems from Cloud Providers mainly focused on IT departments and give little insight into business management. It is clear why for many companies, their Public Cloud costs are a black box.
C-Facts Management Control Center- your efficient (public) cloud cost management solution
With C-Facts, your company gets all the Usage and Cost and Commerce related management information at its disposal. We give you clear insight into costs related to departments, projects and applications, revenue, and margin per customer or service.
With our daily collection of (public) cloud data, we provide you with an up-to-date overview of your Public Cloud usage during the month. We understand that not all data is available via an API, so we give you the option to upload monthly data in CSV format. This data is then available in the C-Facts Control Center, similar to data collected directly from the Public Cloud.
C-Facts enables you to report on spending by cost center, have a clear central overview of non-allocated costs and share this information with all your stakeholders. We replace the PDF or Excel-based reports with an interactive Control Center that enables your stakeholders to get the management insights they need.
If you recognize the challenge to get the needed public cloud insights in your organization but have not yet taken action as you thought it would be a long process, then think again. With C-Facts, you can be up and running in two days.
Want proof? Then contact us via email or phone or request a demo immediately.
Email: sales@c-facts.com
Phone: +31 (0)85 0645 625