Choose the right chargeback solution for greater cloud cost savings

This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, however 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 instance, how do you see all of your costs in a heterogeneous cloud environment? And how do you charge for the resources being used?

The whole truth

â-º Get the whole truth and nothing nevertheless 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 just 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.

â-º Don't settle for "good enough." There is a lot of pressure being put on IaaS vendors to provide metered data and chargeback capabilities, nevertheless the reality is, their core competencies lie in computing infrastructure and cloud management services, not in chargeback. Whatever cost capabilities they provide most likely will not satisfy all your needs across your entire enterprise. There are many things to consider when evaluating your chargeback solution so don't just settle for what's included or you're bound to lose money eventually.

Control freak

â-º Be a control freak. One of the biggest concerns in moving to the cloud is loss of control. The flexibility and agility of the cloud is both a blessing and a curse in that resources can be initiated on demand and increased as needed. Similar to typical utility services like electricity or water, you use what you need, when you need it and hope that you don't get a big surprise at the end of the month when the bill comes. In the case of enterprise computing, that month-end bill could be actually, truly big. To eliminate this risk, you need to choose a chargeback solution that includes proactive controls like budgets, alerts and consumption forecasts. With controls in place, you can identify potential problems earlier they turn into expensive cost overruns.

Every enterprise customer needs to incorporate chargeback into their cloud strategy in order to reach the full potential of cloud cost savings. Don't settle for "good enough" or force-fit a homegrown system. Select a solution in other words built from the ground up for the heterogeneous cloud, full of all the features that will allow you to control costs no matter what your computing environment looks like now, or might look like five years from now.