Simplify the process of cost allocation

Accurately map multicloud and Kubernetes spending data, assign shared costs equitably, and report cloud spend to drive FinOps collaboration for your organization

How much of your cloud spend is allocated?

According to the FinOps Foundation, 80–90% of your cloud spend needs to be allocated to its business ownership and function. If you’re like most organizations, your metadata and tagging strategies, and execution are far from perfect, making comprehensive cost allocation extremely challenging.

Cloud resources and their associated spend need to be mapped to business objects and internal identifiers, such as business units, P&L groups, cost centers, and applications. Moreover, cost and usage data must be divisible in many ways without overlap to enable accurate analysis.

Assessing your cloud cost allocation strategy is a key step in your FinOps journey

Consider the following questions as a starting point:

  1. What percentage of your costs do you allocate today?
  2. How do you allocate the costs of shared services?
  3. Can you map your cloud costs to business units, cost centers, applications, and projects?
  4. Is your cloud spending aligned with your business needs?

Full allocation of multicloud costs is critical for understanding your actual cloud services usage, establishing cloud cost ownership, and creating accurate budgets and forecasts at the line of business, project, application and even team levels.

Can you accurately map your cloud costs to your business?

Most cloud cost management tools support some type of filter grouping capability, which combines multiple tags and filters into one category to make cost exploration and allocation possible. The main problem with filter groups is overlapping costs that result in inaccurate reporting.

If two categories can contain the same costs, the total of the two categories will add up to more than 100% of all the costs. This also means that you can’t use categories to identify your unallocated costs.

That is why Anodot offers business mapping, a capability that empowers you to:

  • Accurately map spending data to relevant business dimensions without overlap
  • Assign shared costs equitably
  • Report cloud spend in a way that is customized to your organization’s needs

Allocate 100% of your multicloud costs

With Anodot, FinOps teams can easily classify and divide all of their cloud costs by business structures like apps, teams, and lines of business using business mappings.

Mappings are built from one or more rules that allocate spend to a business dimension using sophisticated and nested evaluation criteria. With each additional mapping, the remaining pool of cloud costs is further divided without overlap.

Split shared cloud costs any way you want

Every organization has shared IT costs that span multiple business departments. Shared costs include:

  • Platform charges like logging, monitoring, security, and marketplace
  • Shared resources like K8s, network, and shared storage
  • Enterprise support charges like AWS Support, GCP Cloud Customer Care, and Azure Support
  • Enterprise discounts such as cloud volume discounts, RIs and SPs

Identifying and equitably allocating these costs becomes more challenging as businesses and cloud usage grow, and accurately splitting shared costs impacts ownership strategies like showback and chargeback, as well as budgeting, and forecasting.

Anodot business mapping lets you easily split shared costs across multiple business dimensions using FinOps Foundation-endorsed models:

  1. Even split – The targeted costs are split evenly, i.e., 50-50
  2. By percentage – The targeted costs are split by custom percentages, i.e., 25%-25%-50%
  3. Proportional – The targeted costs are divided based on the relative percentage of direct costs

Inform & empower business decisions at all levels

With Anodot business mapping at their fingertips, FinOps teams can increase engineering confidence in cloud spending decisions and improve financial accountability. Using Anodot’s robust cost and usage explorer, Finance and DevOps stakeholders can easily understand and visualize where spend is coming from, track total cloud costs by business dimension over time, identify costs yet to be allocated, drive showback and chargeback processes, and make smart decisions about cloud investments.

Take the next step

Schedule a discovery meeting to see how Anodot cloud cost management can ensure your FinOps success.