Planning Your AWS Cost Allocation with Business Views

So you’ve moved your business to Amazon AWS cloud. Now, you have to figure out how to tie your Cloud infrastructure with “the business” - not only to make it work for your organization but also to plan your budget and AWS cost allocation.

Business Views is a unique offering by Newvem that gives you the visibility into your cloud that you need to make the important financial decisions. Why does this make sense for AWS cloud?

• It shows your CFO the exact cost of resources to support what the business counts as important.
• It allows you to charge back ongoing costs for business divisions (i.e. R&D, marketing, etc.), as well as products and services.
• It enables you to visualize the supply and demand for specific resources and easily scale or reduce inventory when needed.
• Understand in granular detail the true costs allocated to specific business activities, such as the cost to manufacture your products, projects, services, etc.

These detailed views enable the CFO to plan and justify AWS cost allocation. How does it work?

You can use an existing AWS filter or AWS tagging to slice and dice your resources to determine which are billable and allocate costs accordingly. The screen shot below demonstrates exactly how your resources can be sorted. Additionally segmentations options include AWS security groups, AMI ID, AWS tagging, and resource name.

Additional AWS filter options include segmentation by EC2 Instances, EBS volumes and snapshots, security groups, Amazon machine images (AMI), and elastic load balancers (ELB). This can be seen in the screen shot below.

What exactly can you do with Business Groups?

• Internal Business Views – See cost centers, business units, P&L structures within your organization and the actual consumption of the associated cloud infrastructure. Track, account, and analyze precise usage and spend, and align revenues with costs to see how you can increase margins and profits.
• External Business Views – Tie your usage to specific customers, products and services and see the actual relationship between supply and demand. Have demand trigger usage to increase revenues and maximize profits.
• Granular Business Views – Create groupings of activities and projects for cost and managerial accounting efforts to understand the actual costs of your business activities such as the cost to manufacture your products, projects, services, etc.

Newvem Business Views allow you to measure costs, risks, and cloud assets as they apply to specific customers, business divisions, products, services, and any other group that you define.

Sign up today for Newvem Cloud Care and start creating your personalized Business Views.