Category: Best Practices

AWS cloud usage data is a critical component in the IT Financial Management process for AWS customers. As organizations grow in cloud maturity, the cloud usage data may become complex as usage incurs from distributed teams and businesses. Financial and Technology leaders need access to trends, signals, insights, and cost deviations to quickly understand and analyze the cloud usage. The AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) provide comprehensive data about your AWS costs, including information related to product, pricing, and usage. By including the Resource IDs and choosing hourly time granularity, CUR allows you to analyze your costs in greater detail and accuracy. You can download the CUR reports from the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) console, query the reports using Amazon Athena or load the reports into Amazon Redshift or visualize in Amazon QuickSight.

Voiced by Amazon Polly   As the last blog in the Unit Metric series (intro, what is unit metric, selecting a unit metric to support your business, unit metrics in practice – lesson learned), we’ll share how unit metrics is instrumental in gaining alignment across business functions. High quality unit metrics create an opportunity to […]

Voiced by Amazon Polly We hope by now you have a good grasp of what a unit metric is and how you can create your own to evaluate the efficiency of resources usage or project your future spend. Before you jump into action, here are some of the lessons learned along the way we’ve experienced both […]

Voiced by Amazon Polly September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. Having discussed what unit metrics are, real-life use cases, and the benefits they offer, we’ll share how you can create a good unit metric. So, how do you pick a good denominator for our unit metric formula? […]

Voiced by Amazon Polly From time to time, customers will ask me questions like, “my AWS bills are going up and I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing?” Did the bill go up because you’re operating more workloads in the cloud or is it because you’re using AWS inefficiently? Perhaps […]

This year, as the world is still coping with the post-vaccine new normal, cloud cost efficiency and optimization will remain at the top of the agenda. As we are improving our product capabilities, your user experience is at the center of everything we build. We invite you to share your feedback with us, come meet your peers, and share your success stories.

Andy Jassy shared 8 core reinvention guidelines in his 2020 AWS re:Invent keynote. These guidelines are key to keep organizations stay successful and translate well into IT Financial Management. Learn from his speech and our recently published “AWS Cloud Financial Management Guide” about how you can establish effective technology financial management in order to fully realize the value of your investment.

Customers let us know that they want native, automated spend management capability at the point of self-service resource provisioning. AWS Service Catalog allows you to pre-approve services for your users. With its integration with AWS Budgets, you can create and associate budgets with portfolios and products, and keep your developers informed the resource costs for them to run cost-aware workloads. In this blog post, we will walk you through how you can set up a serverless automated workflow to govern the cost for your AWS Service Catalog portfolio.

Procurement and Account Payable (AP) teams are critical players in the IT Financial Management process.  They ensure the accurate and punctual purchase and payment of technology resources that organizations need. From the “traditional technology consumption” era, when organizations had a more structured approval and procurement cycle to acquire and stand up physical infrastructures, to the […]

Gartner estimates a 70% overspend on cloud resources by organizations who do not have a defined plan for cloud cost management. While cloud brings lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), an effective billing management and cost control mechanism is required to make sure you only pay for what you need, and it also empowers your […]