Cloud Billing Tool Pinpoints Who Owes The Bill

Cloudyn announced the release of new tool last week (Oct. 30) that’s aimed at bringing more clarity to cloud billing when it comes to understanding who or what department owes the bill when paying for cloud-based services.

A TechCrunch article dug into the new tool Cost Allocation 360° that the company says will provide executives more confidence in understanding who should be billed and for what amount of services, which had previously placed a burden on finance departments to determine that issue on its own. This tool is also said to help with how resources are allocated for cloud-based billing services.

“Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner says the goal of the tool is to give CFOs the ability to allocate costs to the business units using the resources,”TechCrunch reported. “He said the tool is also aimed at Software as a Service vendors to allocate costs more fairly based on usage. The idea is to provide a way using your company terminology to apply costs in a way that makes sense to your organization.”

Wagner explained that for clients using a service like Amazon S3, the user is billed based on who is paying for it and does not target who or what department in an organization is actually using it. This tool, however, aims to bring more structure and order to the cloud billing process by matching the cost of the cloud service directly to the part of the business that are actually using the service. This is done by tagging resources so it can allocate costs to specific business units, regions or departments.

“If you have several departments and one is storing documents and one is storing video, if you are billing back to the department or project based on usage, the cost should theoretically be higher for the video department,” the article said. “Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked that way until now, at least not without significant effort from the finance department to figure out who owes what.”

The cloud billing tool also enables the business to create its own process to make tracking service usages smoother from the business’ perspective. By providing a clearer method for companies to define usage it can also allow then to allocate resources better throughout its departments.

“The tool actually walks the user through the model building process starting with the accounts you are tracking, the tags the tool can pull automatically, uncategorized resources and the reserved instances associated with this account,” FineTech reported.