Budgeting and Auditing

As enterprises begin to deploy Cloud Services across their business, it is important to allocate usage costs to the appropriate department or cost center. By tracking costs at the cost center level, Enterprises gain visibility throughout their organization.

The platform provides an efficient cost management solution for Enterprise Cloud Services by allocating cost to budgets established for Departments, projects, Lines of Business or other cost centers, and reporting variances of actual vs. budget. The platform can also issue notifications when a certain percentage of a budget has been consumed and/or exceeded.

A quick graphical representation of Budgeting and Auditing functionality in the platform. Click hereto watch the video on how to manage and control cloud cost using budgeting.

Allocate Budget

An Administrator in the Enterprise with special privileges can define the budget and allocate the budget amount towards any Enterprise Attribute (Departments/Cost-center/LOB/projects/products) etc.

Budget codes are defined for a specific time and can be updated mid-term by Administrators if required.

For example: A Budget Code can be created to track the expenditure incurred by various AWS accounts or for tracking the cost of Microsoft licenses consumed by each department in the 1st quarter of 2015.

The Administrator can also define consumption thresholds that send out alerts when accounts are getting close to their limits.

Sample Template

Associate Budget to SaaS Request

Enterprises can track the Budget Utilization in the following manner:

  • The Enterprise user needs to associate the relevant Budget Code while placing a request for a SaaS Service.
  • The platform checks the available Budget amount, and alerts the user in case the the Budget amount is likely to exceeded.
  • If the Enterprise user chooses to proceed despite the alert message, an email is sent to the Enterprise Administrator that a request has been placed which, if approved, will exceed the allocated Budget amount.
  • Once the request is approved, the Budgets are associated to the SaaS Offers and the license cost is treated as the Budget Utilization.
  • The Budgeting application thus provides with visibility into Cloud Service utilization and costs but does not enables users to exceed allocated budget using appropriate approval workflows.

Associate Budget to IaaS Instances and Application Stack

Enterprises can track the Budget Utilization for an IaaS resource in the following manner:

  • The Enterprise user needs to associate the Budget Code while launching an IaaS instance or VM from the Jamcracker Enterprise portal.
  • A Budget Code needs to be associated while creating an Application Stack from the Enterprise portal.
  • The platform checks the available Budget amount, and alerts the user in case their Budget amount is likely to exceed.
  • If the Enterprise user chooses to proceed despite the alert message, an email is sent to the Enterprise Administrator that a request has been placed, which if approved, will exceed the allocated Budget amount’.
  • While approving the IaaS request, if the Budget amount is likely to be exceeded, then the Enterprise Administrator is alerted once again.
  • Once the request is approved by the Enterprise Administrator, the usage towards the IaaS resource is tracked and aggregated on a daily basis.

Tracking Budget Utilization

  • While placing a request in the Enterprise portal, Enterprise users and administrators are alerted with real time notifications to help users and managers stay on budget.
  • On a Daily basis, the Enterprise Administrators are alerted if any Budget amount has been exceeded.
  • The platform also triggers alerts to the Enterprise Administrator when consumption thresholds are reached (Examples: 75% of the amount allocated to a Budget Code is reached).
  • Whenever the Monthly Invoice is generated, the total recurring amount due towards the license cost of the subsequent period is aggregated and check against the allocated Budget amount. If the Budget amount has exceeded, an email is sent to the Enterprise Administrator.

Showback Report

Jamcracker provides Enterprises visibility into Cloud Service utilization and costs from a single, centralized, and unified interface. This is possible from the Showback Report that allows the Enterprise to show high-level allocations of IT Services to the business units.

The platform provides cost aggregation across CSPs that offer their services from the Jamcracker Platform. For example, it is possible to track the total Budget Utilization for all AWS instances provisioned from Jamcracker and associated to a particular Budget Code.

If there are two separate Budget Codes, one for AWS EC2 instances and another for VMWare instances, then by associating the correct Budget codes while launching AWS and VMWare resources, the total usage Utilization can be tracked and compared.

Each Budget Codes can be manually rolled up to provide consolidated usage information by department and business unit. Thus, the quantity of Cloud Services and the associated cost of cloud usage can be traced back to the business services supported.

The Financial Officer at the Enterprise can also to map one or more cost centers or GL codes to a Budget Code and then assign the Budget Code to the consumed service to receive utilization reporting by cost center.