AWS Cloud Financial Management
ICYMI: Designing cost allocation strategies, tracking effectiveness of cloud adoption, and laying foundation for cost optimization
Last month we spoke in depth about understanding how to turn your data into actionable insights. We acknowledged that while having access to real-time data is a clear perk of the cloud, it can often be intimidating to organize and convert it to a visualization or report that makes sense for your organization’s specific business needs.
We outlined some baseline starting points, like working backwards from your strategy, taking a hard look at what account structure best suits your business, and experimenting with AWS Cost Explorer and AWS Cost and Usage Reports to land on data insights that have impact.
Achieving cost organization, allocation, and visualization is vital to:
- understanding the overall value of your cloud investment,
- influencing efficient technology resource consumption behavior,
- establishing a culture of cost awareness and ownership, and
- increasing agility to scale up and down resources.
All of these should correlate with your business strategy and goals.
Resources to help you track and allocate to optimize cloud value
To help, we’ve curated three AWS resources to help you organize, allocate, and visualize your cloud costs:
[AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog]
1. Tracking the effectiveness of cloud adoption
Find out why some organizations have been more successful than others at realizing the value of cloud services, and take a closer look at the challenges and best practices of measuring and tracking the effectiveness of your cloud adoption initiatives. This includes nailing down the “why” of cloud adoption, setting aggressive goals enabled by cloud capabilities, and establishing KPIs that drive performance, not just output.
[AWS Whitepaper]
2. Laying the foundation: Setting up your environment for cost optimization
Get foundational knowledge of best practices that will help you maximize value from your investments, improve forecasting accuracy and cost predictability, and continuously measure your optimization status. By establishing the right processes and behaviors to ensure success when you hit scale, you can unlock the potential of cost optimization in the cloud through your initiatives.
[AWS CFM Talks webinar]
3. How to design your AWS cost allocation strategy
The best way to raise cost awareness is to make users accountable for their own cost and usage – a process that starts by making costs visible internally. Explore the different approaches to cost allocation (sometimes referred to as showback and chargeback), learn how you can choose the right strategy for your organization, and find out which AWS services you can use to implement a cost allocation process.
What’s next?
For more information about AWS services and resources that can help you achieve cost transparency and visibility, and get actionable insights that align with your business objectives, visit our CFM Track and Allocate your IT Costs solutions page.