Financial management

One of the many benefits of a cloud is that you can track consumption of resources and assign a cost to that consumption. At the same time, cloud resources are, by nature, variable. Although hardware resources are reasonably easy to track, network resources are less so, and software resources are downright tricky. IT organizations benefit from alignment of business metrics with IT operations, enabling users to factor in financial information into their cloud decision-making. Through showback or chargeback, you can send each business unit a report of their monthly consumption. True chargeback involves inputting consumption and cost calculations into your organization's financial systems.

Cloud resources must be ready and waiting for new requests to come in. That means services, hardware, and software need to be procured in advance of the end consumer or user "buying" it. So, the flow of payments to IT has shifted. Historically, IT bought services, hardware, and software to support funded projects. With the increased proliferation of cloud computing, however, IT now buys services, hardware, and software before they even know what projects are coming. In order to track what resources are currently being utilized — and project what resources may be needed in the future — monitoring and accounting for usage can provide key pieces of information.

An additional financial consideration is the overhead of supplier management. Suppliers may be providing infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (Saas), platform as a service (PaaS), "solution as a service", or simply computing or network capacity and the people required to manage it. Closely accounting for what is being purchased — and by whom — provides financial transparency and fiscal control to your organization.

Key steps to financial management include:

• Enable billing via showback and chargeback
• Drive usage accounting
• Actively manage suppliers

BMC provides the industry's only truly integrated approach to managing the business of IT. Built on a comprehensive data model that captures the interdependencies among IT functions, the solution bridges the silos of information across demand, supply, resources, financials, and risk to provide a single system of record for visibility, coordination, and control of IT.