Create a Profit Center from Multi Cloud Billing on AWS and Azure

Take Control with Custom Billing Charges and Reporting

One measure you can take to capitalize on your Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure multi cloud investment is to simplify billing and customer-specific pricing with custom billing charges. Custom charges are configurations created by your company to carry out discounts, premiums, and usage rates to end users. Equally as important are cloud billing reports, which allow you to view your cloud usage costs in a single dashboard— giving you the opportunity to detect and analyze trends and behavior.

Using Custom Charges

The cloud doesn’t have to be a cost center. The cloud can be a profit center, but you have to be able to charge for services rendered. Examples of such services include technical support, cloud management, cost optimization, security monitoring, and enforcing compliance. Some providers may wish to charge for these services as a flat fee or a percentage uplift, or some combination of the two.

Benefits of Custom Billing Charges

• Integrate cloud-native fees with internal service fees, on a single bill
• Charge by flat fee or percent uplift or a combination
• Apply discounts and credits as well, as desired

Leveraging Billing Reports

AWS pricing and Azure pricing are both considered “pay-as-you-go”, meaning you only pay for services you use, at any point in time. This model is attractive for modern enterprises, but it can be complicated to monitor and predict usage costs—especially when you are a multi cloud organization. Cloud Management Platforms (CMPs) can help simplify the process with a unified dashboard and aggregated billing and reporting processes.

Benefits of Cloud Billing

• Graph spending to identify savings opportunities
• Export to CSV (Comma Separated Value) for additional analysis in Excel and other tools
• Access historical views to see trends and anomalies

AWS Billing Console, for example, gives you the ability to track costs from AWS Services, Regions, and RI usage. However, enterprises often want more detailed, itemized reports to gain insight into their own company expenses.

CloudCheckr created a Service Charge Breakdown report, currently in preview, to fix this problem for enterprise customers. The report will list customers’ current Reserved Instance usage rates to prove the value you provide by buying RIs and negotiating discounts on behalf of your end users.

The report will have columns showing the savings accrued by your purchased reservations along with the impact of your custom charges. These costs will be broken down by service, with the ability to filter by accounts/account families, as well as by date. It will also show custom discounts and charges on top of those rates. Look for this new report around the middle of March.

Grow Your Cloud Practice

Now take the next step and get access to the technology you need to accelerate your managed services in the cloud. With CloudCheckr, you’ll receive personalized consulting, training, co-promotion, and access to the resources you’ll use to turn cloud management into a profit center for your business. Become a CloudCheckr Partner.