Self-service provisioning is a wonderful thing in terms of agility and time to value, but it creates problems for organizations in the form of 'sprawl,' 'Shadow IT,' and inability to tightly control cloud costs. To facilitate broad adoption and support from an IT organization, a cloud solution - be it public or private - must provide appropriate visibility and controls into cloud usage so that workloads can be monitored against pre-defined thresholds for cost and utilization.
Cloud Cruiser, a provider of cloud consumption analytics, looks to fix this problem with the release of new, enhanced budgeting capabilities for its Cloud Cruiser 16 SaaS application. The application allows customers to optimize their cloud services consumption and is designed to provide rich reporting and analytics for hybrid cloud usage to eliminate waste, control spending, and drive business agility.
With these enhanced budgeting capabilities, their customers have flexibility to better plan and predict future usage with accuracy across multiple dimensions. Budgeting by department or project team and by specific time frames is critical for cloud users. Most importantly, the ability to share real-time information with multi-functional stakeholders across the business drives fast decisions and means customers consume
cloud services with confidence.
Features include:
- Budget Target Per Period: Cloud projects and application teams run on a variety of time frames and Cloud Cruiser's budgeting allows you to set budgets for recurring time frames such as monthly, quarterly, or annually in addition to specific time frames such as three weeks or four months, depending on the nature of the project being managed.
- Budget Target Per Team, Department, or Service Type: Easily adjust budget targets and thresholds filtered by department, geography or team and automatically visualize spend against budget over time, with the ability to adjust on the fly. Additionally, set budget targets by specific cloud provider such as AWS, Azure or Google and by service type such as Compute, Storage or Database.
- Sharing, Proactive Notification, and Access: Central finance team members can set budget targets for department owners, and individuals can create their own budgets, with permissions showing only the related spend. Email alerts drive accountability by proactively informing users when spend reaches a threshold or is projected to exceed the target.
'In the cloud, multiple teams within a business are incurring real cost for their usage and it's no longer central IT's responsibility to manage it,' states Paul Zinn, Cloud Cruiser's Senior Director of Product Management. 'Our customers need a highly flexible way to control their costs across a variety of cloud providers, services, and users and our latest release delivers on that.'