Cloud cost allocation is the process of organizing your cloud costs to business entities, so you can make the right business decisions.
Imagine an invoice of €100.000 for; SQL-database, API-management, webapps, etc.
How do you know if these resources are all needed to deliver the most business value?
Are all these resources used, needed?
By allocating your cloud cost you organize your cost by business entities so you can manage these costs.
You want to make sure your cloud spend delivers the most business value possible.
Without cloud cost allocation you will lose money to resources that are not needed!
Allocation of your cloud cost
By allocation your cloud costs to your needs you start; getting insights, gaining control, and then start optimizing.
Allocation can, for instance, be done by; departments, projects, applications, customers, or …. If needed you can partially allocate shared costs to these entities.
With such an approach your teams can manage their own cloud spend, because they see which cloud cost they make for their department/project or application.
Multiple accounts
By using multiple accounts instead of one account you can already organize your costs to certain business entities.
For instance, you can set up accounts for projects, teams, departments, etc.
Tagging of cloud cost
Allocation of costs starts with tagging fo the cloud resources within the cloud. Tagging is the labeling of certain resources within cloud.
Every cloud provider has its own tagging system:
- AWS cost allocation – AWS uses two types of tagging; AWS generated and user-defined tags. These tags are shown on your cost allocation report. AWS also uses a “createdBy” tag, which you can use to see who created a resource.
- Azure cost allocation
- Google cost allocation – Google uses labels.
Allocation for multi cloud environments can be more challenging. Every cloud provider has its technical language of resources and way of tagging. Unfortunately, there is no uniformity between the cloud providers.
The purpose is to organize your costs, so you need to make sure you determine a thought-out tagging policy. Consistency in the way these tags are used is needed.
A third-party multi cloud cost management solution is needed to get fast insights into all this cloud data.
Non-allocated cloud costs
With the allocation of your cloud cost comes also the insights of non-allocated cloud costs. So probably cloud costs that don’t have an owner to manage these costs.
By allocation of all your cloud costs and giving people the mandate to manage their own cloud spend, you have the base to maximize the business benefits of cloud computing.
Remember!
Cloud cost management is not a one-off. You and your teams need to work on cost control of your cloud spend continuously.
C-Facts for your (multi)cloud cost management
Want to know how C-Facts Management Control Center can help you to organize and manage your (multi) cloud costs to get the most business value from your cloud spend?
C-Facts Management Control Center is specialized in Cloud Cost Management, has a business focus, is up-and-running in 2 days, and has excellent customer support.
See how it works or request a demo.