Cost Visibility
The Challenge
80% of the Cloud Financial Management problem is a lack of role-relevant and user-specific insight.
A lack of role-relevant cloud cost (and utilization) is often a major blocker to efficient spending. This sentiment is echoed by the FinOps frameworks, and by blogs by cloud vendors.
Executives, Finance, Technical teams need to see usage and efficiency in role-relevant ways; however out-of-the-box, cloud vendors do not provide highly customisable cost visuals.
3rd party solution
One option is purchase 3rd party tools to meet your requirements.
Note: tooling coverage across cost estimation, efficiency automation, and visibility is often not provided by a single vendor.
In selecting your tool consider asking questions such as:
- Can it show/hide custom discounts?
- Can it model optimisation scenarios?
- Does it accept budget data?
- Can it easily show week-on-week spend changes?
- Does it visualise spend efficiency?
- Can it show unit cost and accept additional data inputs?
- Can the tool control for data residency requirements?
- Does the data align with the cloud invoice and/or cloud-native tools?
If you'd like support in procuring a tool, feel free to reach out.
Custom dashboard solution
The second option is to work with Goldiserv to develop your own custom dashboard.
The value-add of a custom dashboard is its extremely low run-cost (e.g., $500 p.m.), high customisability, and control over where and how your data is processed.
Customer Impact
For one customer, project costs were covered in the first month after deploying the dashboard, as the user-specific visibility led to a 12% reduction in cloud spend over 30 days.
Executives gained clarity into the revenue driven by cloud spend and understanding of who was driving unexpected changes in spend - enabling better conversations and decisions.
Finance saw streamlined end-of-month budget vs. actual review with automated cost alignment to cost centers.
Engineering was freed up from having to create cloud financial reporting and gained near real-time spend insights. The impact of credits, refunds, and RIs and Savings Plans were removed so spend data more closely aligns with infrastructure decisions that Engineers could control.
As the dashboard and data was customer-owned, the customer could edit the dashboard without needing to extract data into an Excel for spreadsheet for manipulation.