Do you know the ROI of every dollar you spend on the cloud? Before answering that, do you even know exactly what you’re spending cloud dollars on?

The proliferation of the cloud for application deployment and development has turned the traditional financial planning and cost management model on its head. While most CIOs maintain centralized responsibility for IT investment, utilizing the cloud means that there is distributed purchase, usage and management of those resources.

Many organizations struggle with limited visibility into their hybrid and multi-cloud spend. They lack the tools to understand where their IT dollars are going, which resources are underutilized, and where potential savings lie. This lack of transparency can stifle innovation, hinder agility, and bleed money.

The biggest hurdles to enterprise visibility of cloud spend are manual processes around tracking finances and silos of cloud purchase data across departments and LOBs. And let’s not forget the human element either: there is fierce competition for IT budget, and some people may not want transparency into how money is being used on their projects for fear of losing it to someone else.

Here's where the concept of FinOps and a product like Apptio Cloudability steps in, providing comprehensive cost visibility and actionable insights to optimize cloud spending.

Apptio Cloudability helps you manage cloud spending and understand potential cost savings through the following capabilities:

• Multi-cloud Visibility Through A Single Pane of Glass: Organization-wide dashboards let business leaders see, measure and share direct and indirect cloud costs at the enterprise, team, application, and project level.

• Standard Architecture Model: Provides capabilities to automatically ingest data from multiple cloud sources (AWS, Azure, GCP, and more), aggregate it, and include it in calculations around your TCO for cloud infrastructure.

• Advanced Allocations: The Allocation Engine supports direct, weighted, and consumption-based allocation strategies by analyzing usage and utilization data. Business Mappings let you organize the data in a way that enables real-time access to cloud spend, including shared and attribution spending.

• Unified Cloud IaaS and SaaS Spend: Helps you drive cloud financial management best practices by aggregating these into one single view. Create reports that support full chargeback and calculate organization specific pricing for shared costs and ancillary costs to support the cloud infrastructure.

• Profitability Analysis: Align cloud spend data to key business metrics, such as revenue. Track cloud expenses with KPIs that help you understand Cost Per Core, Cost Per Query, or Custom Margin Analysis.

Understanding the total costs related to your cloud spend is just the first step. Once you are informed on how you are spending money on the cloud, Apptio Cloudability also has advanced capabilities to understand and optimize your use of savings plans combined with convertible reserved instances, removing human overhead to manage and purchase commitments while building support for usage spikes and seasonal demand.

Apptio intelligently collects and structures your cloud spend, cost, and consumption data. With a clear understanding of your technology spend and what it returns to your business, you can confidently invest in the cloud and prioritize your technology investments.

If you are interested in reducing cloud waste, improving forecast accuracy, and allocating cloud costs, please click here to request a meeting with us. Don’t have an information architecture for AI you trust yet? LRS can also help you collect, organize, and analyze your data so that it is business ready.