Cloud financial governance best practices
1. Cloud financial governance best practices
Let’s explore some cloud financial governance best practices that organizations can adopt to increase the predictability and control of their cloud resources. The first best practice is to identify who manages cloud costs. If it's a team, it should ideally be a mix of IT managers and financial controllers. Because Cloud spending is decentralized and variable, it's important to establish a culture of accountability for costs across the organization. Defining clear ownership for projects and sharing cost views with the departments and teams that are using cloud resources helps establish this accountability culture and more responsible spending. As well as making teams accountable for their spending, Google Cloud financial governance policies and permissions make it easy to control who can spend and view costs across your organization. In addition, Google Cloud offers flexible options to organize resources and allocate costs to individual departments and teams. For example, budgets notify key stakeholders based on your actual or forecasted cloud costs. Creating multiple budgets with meaningful alerts is an important practice for staying on top of your cloud costs. The second best practice is to understand what kind of information can be found in an invoice versus cost management tools. They’re not the same concept. An invoice is a document that is sent by a cloud service provider to a customer to request payment for the services that were used. However, a cost management tool is software to help track, analyze, and optimize cloud spend. An organization is rarely only interested in how much they spend. They also want to know why they spent that much. Cost management tools, like those built into the Google Cloud console, are effective for answering the why. They can provide granular data, uncover trends, and identify actions to take to control or optimize costs. And this brings us to the third best practice for increasing the predictability and control of cloud resources: use Google Cloud’s cost management tools. Google Cloud believes in supporting organizations by providing strong financial governance tools that make it easier for customers to align their strategic priorities with their cloud usage. Before organizations can optimize their cloud costs, they first need to understand what they're spending, whether there are any trends, and what their forecasted costs are. So, how can this be done? Start by capturing what cloud resources are being used, by whom, for what purpose, and at what cost. From there, determine who will be responsible for monitoring that information, who will be involved in managing costs, and how the spending information will be reported on an ongoing basis. It's also important to set up the cadence and format for ongoing communication with main cloud stakeholders. Having this plan outlined up front helps ensure that managing costs isn't an afterthought. And how can you monitor current cost trends and identify areas of waste that could be improved? Google Cloud provides built-in reporting capabilities, which can help your team gain visibility into costs. Ideally, reports should be reviewed weekly, at a minimum. One powerful tool is the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator. The Pricing Calculator lets you estimate how changes to cloud usage will affect costs. The calculator is available at cloud.google.com/products/calculator. Now that you’ve had a chance to explore some cloud financial governance best practices, the next step is to implement them. If this doesn’t fall into your scope of responsibility, be sure to pass on those best practices to the relevant stakeholders within your organization.2. Let's practice!
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