What does the cloud cost?

Today, a mix of very different IT services are used in data centers, which can come from the public cloud or a private cloud. Typical services include the provision of infrastructure (IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service), applications (SaaS - Software as a Service) or development platforms (PaaS - Platform as a Service).

The diverse use and mix of different cloud providers makes centralized management of cloud services necessary, as this is the only way to efficiently control the complex processes surrounding procurement, provision and billing.

Tasks such as demand and usage analysis, user management and billing require the use of special software solutions that also support cloud cost management. Processes from ordering to cost analysis should be controlled automatically so that users from the specialist departments can obtain all cloud services on a self-service basis.

The aim of cloud cost management should be to provide IT managers with detailed cost and performance control across all cloud services. This makes it possible, among other things, to bill consumption-based costs and fixed license costs - which are also possible in the cloud - and allocate them to clients.

It is also important to allocate the cloud services to specific business services in order to compare the benefits of the cloud with the actual costs. The resulting transparency ultimately allows cloud costs to be optimized.

In addition to this, the market research and consulting company "PAC - A CXP Group Company" and Materna published a study that shows how companies are using IT resources from the cloud today and what challenges need to be solved when operating hybrid IT infrastructures. The results are available free of charge at materna.de/cloud-management-study.

In our statement service, Materna expert Philipp Kleinmanns, Head of Portfolio Management at Materna, reports on specific solutions for cost management in the cloud.

"Today, cloud services must also be automatically available and billable for less tech-savvy users in self-service. This applies to cloud providers as well as internal IT departments that offer cloud services for specialist departments and partners. Cloud cost management for multi-cloud environments is necessary here in order to be able to determine costs transparently on an ongoing basis".

Philipp Kleinmanns, Head of Portfolio Management in the IT Factory division at Materna, comments on the development.

"There are various solutions for cloud cost management that help to keep an eye on costs in complex cloud environments. Such systems manage the cloud offerings of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, IBM and other providers with their prices, including agreed discount scales for certain terms.

This makes it very easy for IT managers to analyze where the operation of a business process, which may consist of several cloud services, is most cost-effective during the desired execution time or what costs are incurred during use"

Kleinmanns continues.