Overview

“Decentralised budgets and initially unpredictable cloud spend, demand a new take on reporting and forecasting”

As financial reporting is a crucial part of business management, insights for the business on cloud spend are essential as new (cloud) cost models are based on a continuous stream of spends (‘pay-per-use’) and can cause cost increasing trends when not managed properly.​

Even if an organisation is not yet mature in its efforts to adopt cloud, budgets and expectations around cloud spend must be managed. It is necessary to arrange a periodic insight in cloud expenses. Created reports and dashboards, can be implemented in financial management processes in order to manage budgets and forecast cloud expenses. By using defined tags of cloud resources, a breakdown can be generated in many ways. Costs generated using SaaS can be included as well.​

Reports and dashboards monitoring cloud spend are governance tools to assess alignment (or misalignment) between business goals and IT spend.

Activities checklist

Initial:

• Designing tailormade cost reports that can be automatically generated and distributed periodically​
• Determining ownership​
• Setting budget alarms​
• Designing and implementing dashboards to support decision making​
• Analysing current reporting & forecasting processes and amend​
• Providing training on the impact of the use of cloud on financial constructs​
• Providing training on the use of cost management tools and platforms​
• Selecting and implementing tools for reporting & forecasting

Recurring:

• Creating & processing reports & forecasting​
• Optimising reports by creating feedback loops across finance and management to IT​
• Reviewing cloud budgets​
• Optimising budgets and alarms

RASCI