IBM Cloudability Feature
Cost Sharing
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Assign 100% of unallocated and shared cloud costs
When charging back cloud costs, most organizations face a category of cost that can’t be directly assigned to teams. Put simply, this bucket needs to be split up and shared out based on agreed rules. This can be due to issues like bulk charges (such as enterprise support), shared infrastructure, untagged resources, or lack of attributes in the billing data. Manually sharing these costs out using complicated spreadsheets can take many person-hours each month and is error prone. IBM Cloudability’s Cost Sharing capability solves these exact challenges, helping FinOps admins automatically allocate this “last mile” of cloud spend and hold teams financially accountable.
Allocate based on proportion to direct, fixed percentage, or telemetry data
IBM Cloudability’s Cost Sharing works with the Business Dimensions that you’ve already defined via direct mapping rules, operating on any number of shared cost groups within. This capability gives you the flexibility to apply all required rules against these groups, in the order that makes sense, for each relevant Business Dimension until all costs are assigned out.
FinOps administrators are able to tailor rules that best match the characteristics of each shared bucket. Common use cases include allocating:
- Enterprise support charges to all teams proportionally based on direct spend.
- Third-party vendor spend – such as Databricks, Splunk and Snowflake – to relevant applications based on fixed percentages.
- Shared databases and APIs to consuming clients based on telemetry data such as database transactions and API calls.
Validate and adjust rules with ease
Cost Sharing comes with a handy set of tools to help FinOps admins organize their rules and validate the outputs. This includes the Explorer, a visual tool which enables you to track cost flows across each rule boundary, making it simple to identify exactly what amount was shared from source to destination. Building confidence in these cost sharing rules is crucial to delivering an automated chargeback and rolling out data across teams.
Roll out allocated spend data to teams and stakeholders
To enable team ownership of this fully allocated spend, it’s necessary to bring visibility and a means to engage with this information. IBM Cloudability delivers this via its rich analytics and dashboarding. Users can explore the costs assigned to them and their teams with a clear delineation between what is direct and what has been shared. By creating rich visualizations and sharing dashboards all stakeholders can understand what is driving both categories of spend and stay up to date as costs trend up and down.
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