Choose the right chargeback solution for greater cloud cost savings

As computing resources and enterprise dollars move to the cloud, cost transparency, control and chargeback become a critical business requirement

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

While cloud computing offers many opportunities for IT cost savings, its diverse and dynamic nature can make it difficult to reap the expected financial benefits. For example, how do you see all of your costs in a heterogeneous cloud environment? And how do you charge for the resources being used?

Though there are several chargeback options available, no two are the same. The more money you invest in the cloud, the greater cost rewards you can realize with the right chargeback solution. Consider the following guidelines and choose wisely.

CLOUD COMPUTING: How to craft a smart chargeback strategy

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This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

While cloud computing offers many opportunities for IT cost savings, its diverse and dynamic nature can make it difficult to reap the expected financial benefits. For example, how do you see all of your costs in a heterogeneous cloud environment? And how do you charge for the resources being used?

Though there are several chargeback options available, no two are the same. The more money you invest in the cloud, the greater cost rewards you can realize with the right chargeback solution. Consider the following guidelines and choose wisely.

CLOUD COMPUTING: How to craft a smart chargeback strategy

TREND: Forget public cloud or private cloud, it's all about hyper-hybrid

► Your IT costs shouldn't be "cloudy." The cloud has fundamentally changed how IT costs are accounted for and enterprises must adopt a chargeback solution or risk losing money in the cloud. And while every enterprise may not be ready to implement all the features of chargeback right away, you should at a minimum have holistic visibility to all of your IT costs. If you're moving to the cloud to reduce your IT costs and you don't know what your costs are, how do you know if you are actually meeting your goals? In order to truly control your costs, you need to select a chargeback solution that gives you end-to-end cost visibility for all of your costs, across all of your platforms -- public, private, hybrid and traditional.

► Become a collector of fine things. By fine, we mean granular. Granular data gives you the ultimate visibility to where your IT costs are adding up or getting out of line. Lump sum usage data won't cut it when you're trying to identify problem areas or implement billing. Choose a solution that collects, aggregates and stores granular-level data so you have the power to perform sophisticated BI analytics, data recovery, billing and auditing.

► Think outside the box. Your cost management solution should allow you to collect data from multiple vendors so it can accommodate the environment you currently have and evolve with you as you expand further into the cloud. The beauty of the cloud is that you are not locked into any one environment -- you can virtualize your existing hardware, burst out to a public cloud, implement a private cloud, or change providers at the drop of a hat. You're not locked in, so why choose a chargeback solution that is?

► Get the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Your IT costs are made up of more than just gigabytes and CPU cycles so if you're only capturing costs from your IaaS provider, you're not getting the complete picture. Choose a solution that's able to capture all of your IT costs, which may include computing resources from public, private or hybrid clouds, labor and facility costs, software license fees and more. Your solution should be customizable to allow input from various data sources such as databases, log files, spreadsheets, Web services and reports so that you can integrate all of your IT costs regardless of what they are or where they reside. You'll gain a better, more complete understanding of your IT costs that will make you more successful in budgeting, business planning and billing.