Financial Governance for Data Processing in the Cloud

Chapter 3. Financial Governance for Data Processing

Financial governance generally refers to the ability to collect, monitor, track, and control financial information.

When you’re reading the following chapters, it is important for you to distinguish between simple cost control and financial governance. Cost control refers to the practice of taking action to minimize costs, whereas financial governance is a much wider topic that not only focuses on minimizing costs (though obviously that is a core objective), but also on providing fully traceable and predictable costs.

Any good financial governance process therefore includes three distinct elements:

Cost control

Ensuring that no costs are being accrued that are not needed, and those that must be are minimized.

Traceability

The ability to know who is spending what, when, and why and to be able to relate that back to the business value being delivered.

Predictability

To understand and be able to predict what future costs will be.

Good financial governance will likely lead to discovery of potential cost control, but in some cases, a decision might need to be made to increase cost in favor of traceability and predictability. As a simple example, a decision might be made to use multiple distinct pieces of infrastructure traceable back to specific departments or use cases. A shared platform might be cheaper to run, but individual usage can’t be tracked, so costs could not be fully traceable.

Financial Governance in the Cloud ...