Managing IT costs and providing financial visibility

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The proliferation of IT systems and options to enable areas outside of IT to make their own purchasing decisions. This has made IT cost management increasingly difficult to successfully provide visibility into costs and for IT to manage or control them.

Historically there has been underutilisation in physical compute resources. Virtualisation promised to alleviate this concern, which led to a sprawl of virtual machines. Then cloud computing arrived, which allows anyone with a credit card to create their own IT resources.

This has created or increased challenges such as:

  • How to successfully monitor costs within heterogenous cloud environments that may be managed by different groups
  • Using a unified approach for cost management between business, finance and IT
  • Managing IT resource sprawl and providing accurate cost information to consumers (e.g. show-back or chargeback)
  • Managing cloud costs and budgets across multiple cloud providers

    • All major cloud providers provide cost management tools for their platform, which can help to manage costs and cloud budgets better and provide some recommendation as to where organisations can save money. However, in heterogenous environments, they will only provide a partial view of the total environment.

    Several companies offer solution to allow for a common view regardless of the platform addressing the typical challenges and support:

  • Optimise cloud resource consumption and rates aligned to financial principles and visible to all relevant groups – business, financial and IT
  • Guidance for cloud financial data based on business needs
  • Visibility into cloud account hierarchy
  • Ability to optimise resources through improved visibility across technology – and with some solutions expanding this to a full view of all costs
  • Support visibility into workflows and processes allowing automation

    • While these solutions – e.g. Apptio, CloudCheckr, Cloudability – come at additional cost, they can provide a very detailed view about costs and resources: allowing to identify unused or under-utilised resources, identifying poorly allocated budgets and in some cases a full end-to-end view covering purchase/run costs, support costs, project costs, etc.

    Diaxion can advise on Diaxion Cloud Finance Visibility and Optimisation to improve your visibility into IT spend and beyond, and to develop a strategy or roadmap how to optimise and measure and track results.

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