Cloud Total Cost of Ownership

Bring financial accountability to the total cost of running cloud

The Whole Cloud Cost Story

Cloud costs don’t end with your monthly AWS, Azure, and GCP bills. Monthly invoices only represent a part of the cloud cost story.

To measure cloud program TCO, cloud leaders need to bring direct and indirect cloud costs together. They can then allocate them back to the business based upon team, product, or application. This helps both determine a fully-burdened unit cost measurement which indicates whether rising cloud costs correlate to accelerating innovation and profitability — or when there are inefficiencies that need to be addressed.

80%

of organizations will overspend their IaaS budgets due to a lack of cost optimization.
– Gartner

Stock image of a group meeting

Common Cloud Total Cost of Ownership Challenges:

  • Understanding what contributes to the total cost of a cloud-based app
  • Determining fully loaded unit costs for an app or product
  • Allocating direct and shared cloud costs back to teams
  • Calculating which cloud apps are returning the most value

Cloud Total Cost of Ownership Solutions Help You

Bring direct and indirect costs together to determine the total cost of your cloud program.

Assign cloud program spend to teams in a way that makes sense for your business.

Keep teams accountable and alert stakeholders when costs reach certain thresholds.

IBM Cloudability TotalCost: Capture & Allocate Total Cloud Program Spend

Cloud costs don’t end at your monthly AWS, Azure, and GCP bills. Get visibility into your total cloud program spend, including:

  • Observability solutions that help ensure operational and security integrity across a fleet of VMs
  • Specialized cloud technologies, including CDNs and serverless data warehouses
  • Labor and additional vendors like IBM and Oracle

Typical Customer Outcomes

100%

Allocation of cloud program costs

30%

Reduction in unit costs

Develop unit economics to measure profitability

Mapping AWS, Azure, and GCP Services to a Standard Taxonomy

With significant investment in public cloud solutions, you need a better way to compare cloud costs and improve your ROI. However, cloud costs are complex and variable; it is challenging to classify costs and produce actionable technology cost analytics. Enter FinOps!

Download the Cloud ATUM poster to learn FinOps best practices.

  • 92% allocation of cloud costs within 3 months of implementation
  • Improved cost transparency and financial accountability

Read the case study