Financial Governance for Data Processing in the Cloud

Chapter 4. Stage 1: Understand

The first stage in achieving effective financial governance is to understand your current cloud usage and therefore identify the gaps between your current position and effective financial governance.

To take this step, it is necessary to gather data to answer the following questions:

• What is being spent and how is that split across different services?

• Who is responsible for that spending?

• How does that spending relate to business objectives or value creation?

In a traditional on-premises infrastructure, data processing costs cannot be easily categorized into infrastructure and data processing buckets. However, in the cloud, billing is a mixture of on-demand infrastructure creation and usage-based service charges—and although cloud providers typically present a single bill for all usage at month end, a cloud platform can (if the right systems are used) break these down at a much more granular level to give very specific levels of traceability.

Financial Governance Tools Provided by Cloud Service Providers

All cloud service providers have billing dashboards that you can use to understand the costs across the cloud estate. Typically, these tools will allow infrastructure managers to report on costs associated with running the compute, network, storage, and services that make up their cloud environments.

The default dashboard views provided give you a useful “at a glance” understanding of where costs are being incurred. Usually, the out-of-the-box ...