Are you wondering why your Public Cloud Costs are a black box?
Find out the top three reasons why companies struggle to make their (public) cloud costs transparent and what you need to look for if you are selecting a solution to gain the cloud cost insights you need to govern your Public Cloud spend properly.
Reason number 1: Financial accounting does not fulfil the need of business management
Many companies rely on their financial reporting based on accountancy rules to manage their business. But accounting reporting or financial reporting does not fulfil the needs of Business Management to get day-to-day insight into Cloud cost, revenue and margin split by service, departments, customers or projects.
Reason number 2: Aggregated data lacks the Cloud Cost insights
Financial reporting is compliancy 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 cloud cost reporting system doesn’t provide that level of detail.
- That is not how we report things.
- Introducing a new ledger code into our reporting is just too time-consuming.
- We report that under code x.
The result is that management manages the business 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.
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.
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.
Reason number 3: Getting the cloud cost data available to management
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 cloud cost insights needed to drive the business.
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 (Public) cloud providers where employees can scale their cloud environment up and down when needed, and it is clear that conventional reporting tools do not fit.
An added hurdle is the proprietary billing systems from Cloud Providers that mainly focus on IT departments and give business management little to no insight. It becomes clear why for many companies, their Public Costs are a black box. So how do you overcome these challenges?
The solution: a Business cloud cost insight service
So how do you select a cloud cost insight tool that supports your business management? Let’s have a look at some of the most critical items.
Cloud-Native
You started to use the Public Cloud to give you flexibility, scale, and relieve you from investing in and managing hardware. It makes sense to find a cloud-native cost reporting service that gives you the same benefits.
Multi-cloud
You might use one specific public cloud now, but are you sure that this will be the case in 2 years? Probably not, so make sure you choose a solution that supports multiple clouds instead of a proprietary tool for one cloud.
Non-cloud data
Also, look at how easy it is to add non Cloud data to the reporting tool. You want that Management Control Center to give all stakeholders the most accurate information with data from multiple sources, cloud or non-cloud.
Allocation and accessibility of Cloud Cost insights
Cloud Cost insights are only helpful for Business Management if they can allocate them to the applicable cost centers and can be easily accessed by all stakeholders like departmental managers, application teams, and c-level management.
No IT-tools please!
And lastly, make sure the tool focuses on Business Management, and its needs instead of the IT-Tool that also does “something” around Business insights. C-facts can help you in making your (public) cloud costs transparent so you can take the right business decisions. Want to see how? Book your demo via +31 (0)85 0645 625 or sales@c-facts.com or demo-form.