About two weeks ago, we discussed how to use enStratus labels to help prevent VM sprawl. As an organization adopts cloud computing, however, VM sprawl is just one of the new challenges cloud computing presents. Over the next quarter, enStratus will be introducing a number of features to return control over finances and budgets back to the finance department.
Companies often adopt cloud computing to reduce procurement windows and eliminate capital expenditures. These benefits come with the side-effect of reducing the ability of the finance department to prevent IT from over-spending or managing who is spending approved funds on what resources. enStratus provides that control.
Billing Codes
In our next release in January/February, we will introduce the ability to assign billing codes to users and define budgets against those billing codes. When users launch virtual machines, enStratus will track your enStratus and cloud costs against a billing code assigned to that user. As usage for a given month appears to put the budget for a billing code at risk, enStratus will send members of the finance department an alert enabling them to take action.
We will also be tying billing codes into the custom role definitions we are also rolling out in the next release. This feature will enable you to define permissions such as "able to shut down servers associated with my billing codes".
Unified Reporting
This next release will provide monthly reports that will identify all costs associated with your cloud infrastructure across all clouds. The report will break down by billing code and include estimated cloud provider costs as well as enStratus costs. You will be able to download these costs and important them into your internal financial control systems.
Shared Resource Accounting
Another challenge in cloud computing is the management of budgets allocated to shared infrastructure. When you deploy a set of servers with a cloud provider using the enStratus cluster manager, you can assign different billing codes to the services running in that cluster and enStratus will split the infrastructure costs across the associated billing codes.Bringing It Together
The net impact of these enhancements is that your finance department will maintain control over the financial impacts of IT procurement without creating the unwieldy procurement processes that cloud computing is supposed to help you escape from. Finance will be able to create budgets for different groups and monitor the spending across those budgets. IT will still be able to procure within the constraints of those budgets and know in advance if those budgets are at risk.
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