Cloud Financial Management with AWS

Transform your business with cost transparency, control, forecasting, and optimization

The cloud allows you to trade fixed expenses (such as data centers and physical servers) for variable expenses, and only pay for IT as you consume it. And, because of the economies of scale, the variable expenses are much lower than what you would pay to do it yourself. Whether you were born in the cloud, or you are just starting your migration journey to the cloud, AWS has a set of solutions to help you manage and optimize your spend.

During this unprecedented time, many businesses and organizations are facing disruption to their operations, budgets, and revenue. AWS has a set of solutions to help you with cost management and optimization. This includes services, tools, and resources to organize and track cost and usage data, enhance control through consolidated billing and access permission, enable better planning through budgeting and forecasts, and further lower cost with resources and pricing optimizations. 

Cloud Financial Management Solution Areas

Organize and Report Cost and Usage based on User-Defined Methods

You need complete, near real-time visibility of your cost and usage information to make informed decisions. AWS equips you with tools to organize your resources based on your needs, visualize and analyze cost and usage data in a single pane of glass, and accurately chargeback to appropriate entities (e.g. department, project, product). Rather than centrally policing the cost, you can provide real-time cost data that makes sense to your engineering, application, and business teams. The detailed, allocable cost data allows teams to have the visibility and details to be accountable of their own spend.

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Manage Billing and Control Costs

Business and organization leaders need a simple and easy way to access AWS billing information, including a spend summary, a breakdown of all service costs incurred by accounts across the organization, along with discounts and credits. Customer can choose to consolidate your bills and take advantage of higher volume discounts based on aggregated usage across your bills. Leaders also need to set appropriate guardrails in place so you can maintain control over cost, governance, and security. AWS helps organizations balance freedom and control by enabling the governance of granular user permission.

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Improved Planning with Flexible Forecasting and Budgeting

Businesses and organizations need to plan and set expectations around cloud costs for your projects, applications, and more. The emergence of the cloud allowed teams to acquire and deprecate resources on an ongoing basis, without relying on teams to approve, procure and install infrastructure. However, this flexibility requires organizations to adapt to the new, dynamic forecasting and budgeting process. AWS provides forecasts based on your cost and usage history and allows you to set budget threshold and alerts, so you can stay informed whenever cost and usage is forecasted to, or exceeds the threshold limit. You can also set reservation utilization and/or coverage targets for your Reserved Instances and Savings Plans and monitor how they are progressing towards your target.

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Optimize Costs with Resource and Pricing Recommendations

With AWS, customers can take control of your cost and continuously optimize your spend. There are a variety of AWS pricing models and resources you can choose from to meet requirements for both performance and cost efficiency, and adjust as needed. When evaluating AWS services for your architectural and business needs, you will have the flexibility to choose from a variety of elements, such as operating systems, instance types, availability zones, and purchase options. AWS offers resources optimization recommendations to simplify the evaluation process so you can efficiently select the cost-optimized resources. We also provide recommendations around pricing models (up to 72% with Reserved Instances and Savings Plans and up to 90% with Spot Instances) based on your utilization patterns, so you can further drive down your cost without compromising workload performance.

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Guidance for Cloud Financial Management on AWS
Manage and optimize your expenses for cloud services. This Guidance helps you set up Cloud Financial Management (CFM) capabilities including near real-time visibility and cost and usage analysis to support decision-making for topics such as spend dashboards, optimization, spend limits, chargeback, and anomaly detection and response.

Learn about ways to transform your business with cost transparency, control, forecasting, and optimization.

Get the single-pane view of your AWS cost and usage data and create data exports and dashboards for deeper analysis

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Develop a holistic cost optimization strategy and operate cost-effectively while maintaining high performance

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Turn your AWS Cost and Usage Reports into actionable insights with a few clicks with cost and usage dashboards

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AWS Cloud Financial Management Services

Whether you want to organize and track your cost and usage, enhance control through consolidated billing and access permission, enable better planning through budgeting and forecasting, or further lower cost with resources and pricing optimizations, you can leverage our services, tools, and resources to help reduce your AWS bill. 

Use Cases Capabilities AWS Resources
Organize Construct your cost allocation strategy that aligns with your business logic AWS Billing ConductorAWS Cost Allocation Tags | AWS Cost Categories
Report Raise awareness and accountability of your cloud spend with the detailed, allocable cost data AWS Cost Explorer | AWS Cost and Usage Report | AWS Application Cost Profiler
Access Track billing information across the organization in a consolidated view AWS Consolidated Billing | AWS Purchase Order Management | AWS Credits
Control Establish effective governance mechanisms with the right guardrails in place AWS Cost Anomaly Detection | AWS Identity and Access Management AWS Organizations | AWS Control Tower | AWS Service Catalog
Forecast Estimate your resource utilization and spend with forecast dashboards that you create AWS Cost Explorer (Self-Service) | AWS Budgets (Event-Driven)
Budget Keep your spend in check with custom budget threshold and auto alert notification AWS Budgets AWS Budget Actions AWS Service Catalog
Purchase Leverage free trials and programmatic discounts based on your workload pattern and needs AWS Free Tier | AWS Reserved Instances | AWS Savings Plans | AWS Spot Instances | Amazon DynamoDB On-demand
Elasticity Scale and schedule your services based on your expected utilization pattern and needs AWS Instance Scheduler Amazon Redshift pause and resume | EC2 Auto Scaling | AWS Trusted Advisor
Rightsize Align your service allocation size to your actual workload demand AWS Cost Explorer Right Sizing Recommendations | AWS Compute Optimizer | Amazon Redshift resizeAmazon S3 Intelligent Tiering
Inspect Stay up-to-date with your resource deployment and cost optimization opportunities

AWS Cost Explorer

Top 4 things you need to know

VIDEO
Dive Deep into Fidelity's KPI Journey
Hear how and why Fidelity's KPIs have evolved through its cloud journey, and how they’re launching into the future.
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BLOG
Getting started your CFM strategy
Learn how you should think about each CFM pillar and layer tooling into your strategy.
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VIDEO
Use CFM to improve business outcomes
See what processes you can use to establish your CFM initiatives and maximize business value.
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CUSTOMER STORY
How Delhivery saved 15% of AWS cost in 50 days
Learn how Delhivery built automated cost monitoring and tracking capabilities with transparency and accountability
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