Getting a Handle on Cloud Costs: How AWS’s New Cloud Financial Management Service Can Help

As enterprises rapidly scale infrastructure to the cloud, monitoring and optimizing cloud spending is becoming increasingly challenging. Organizations can easily lose track of expenses spread across multiple accounts, services, and regions.suddenly receive surprisingly high bills without realizing spending thresholds have been crossed. Financial leaders need better visibility and control to efficiently manage cloud costs.

AWS has stepped up to address this need with the preview launch of their new Cloud Financial Management service. Designed specifically to provide enhanced financial oversight for the cloud, this new offering aims to help enterprises get a grip on expenses to reduce waste and unnecessary spending. Let’s take a deeper look at how it works and key capabilities.

Centralized Tracking and Analytics of AWS Cloud Costs

At its core, Cloud Financial Management allows centralized tracking of AWS usage, cost, and spending trends across all enabled accounts and linked billing sources. Real-time dashboards deliver visual insights about cloud expense patterns, like identify spikes for drill-down analysis.

Granular filtering options make it simple to analyze costs along different dimensions—by the hour/day/month, service, account ID, linked account, application, and more. These custom reporting perspectives unlock deeper understanding of what workloads and resources are driving cloud spending.

Trend analysis shows historical spend over time so you can spot inconsistent usage volumes or seasonal apps with periodic resource needs. Identifying these patterns pave the way for optimizations like uscheduled shutdowns or auto-scaling rules. The analytics transform raw cloud usage data into actionable business intelligence.

Budget Alerts and Forecasting for Proactive Management
Here are some of the key capabilities available for proactive financial management of cloud usage:

Budget Threshold Alerts – Set custom alerts tied to billing/cost categories when usage crosses defined thresholds so you can course correct before overspending. Control alerts for variances against budgets or month-to-date spending against forecasts.

Budget Planning and Tracking – Break down cloud budgets by resource tags, accounts, services or other filters for granular tracking against actual monthly, quarterly or yearly expenses. Visualize budget vs actual on dashboards.

Automated Forecasting – Leverage best-fit forecasting based on historical usage to predict future cloud expenses via monthly/quarterly projections. Identify workloads driving projections for capacity planning.

“What-if” Scenario Planning – Model different scenarios adjusting variables like user growth, usage holdbacks, or workload migrations. Estimate how cloud spending might change based on strategic shifts or growth trajectory.

These capabilities transform Cloud Financial Management into a robust financial planning tool for strategic cloud expense management and controls.

Actionable Optimization via Machine Learning
While visibility and tracking provide control, the real business value lies in optimizing cloud investments. Cloud Financial Management delivers tailored recommendations designed put savings within reach. The service applies integrated machine learning algorithms against cloud usage and cost data to identify potential areas to reduce waste.

Let’s explore a few examples of expense optimizations uncovered with ML-powered analysis:

Idle Resource Detection – Detect patterns like development environments or infrequently accessed resources that remain provisioned despite minimal use. Savings can be captured by decommissioning unnecessary resources.

RI Optimization – Analyze EC2 and database usage history to purchase Reserved Instances and Savings Plans that match steady-state resource needs, reducing hourly run rates substantially.

Utilization Rightsizing – Highlight overprovisioned resources that should scale down to properly match current demand and workload, eliminating margin of unused capacity.

These actionable recommendations can be tracked and assigned to support real cost savings. The system estimates total savings that would be captured based on optimization actions targeting identified inefficiencies.

Built-in Integrations and Simplicity
For organizations already using AWS Billing and Cost Management tools, Cloud Financial Management neatly integrates to leverage existing data flows and cost allocation logic defined there. No need for redundant configuration or added data analytics overhead.

The service also couples with Service Quotas to keep cloud usage aligned with preset quotas and thresholds as an additional guardrail against unintended spikes in cloud spending. Administration integrates with AWS Organizations for easy policy management across multiple accounts.

Together this makes rollout simple. And the backend complexity of pull usage into analytics and machine learning algorithms stays hidden from view, providing users just the financial intelligence outputs needed to better optimize cloud expenses.

Driving Better Cloud Outcomes
As cloud continues to dominate enterprise IT and the heart of digital transformation initiatives, getting a handle on cloud costs has become a business imperative. Cloud Financial Management finally gives finance and tech leaders the purpose-built tool required to understand expenses and then consistently optimize their cloud investment. By identifying savings opportunities and putting guardrails in place to avoid unintended spending, enterprises can smooth volatility and maximize existing cloud infrastructure.

If your organization deals with questions around cloud spending or lacks cohesive insights connecting usage to costs, Cloud Financial Management may be the ideal solution to set your cloud financial house in order. Reach out to learn more and get started with a preview today.