This blog was co-authored with Jeevan Prabhu and Mageshwaran Rajendran
As organizations drive towards cloud spend accountability, Cost Insight’s Showback capability provides transparency into the consumption of IT resources by business units or organizational groups, and their associated costs. Cost Insight is designed to be a multi-cloud cost management solution and hence, Showback can aggregate costs across multiple cloud platforms, delivering a single comprehensive report, promoting a culture of cost awareness to IT assets. Showback report details can be exported out and socialized. Let’s look at some best practices to maximize the value of Showback:
Automate hybrid cloud cost transparency
Eliminate manual cumbersome process with automated cloud cost data collection from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and VMware vCenter private cloud.
Create resource grouping via tagging
Create homogeneous (resources from one single cloud) or heterogeneous (resources from multiple clouds) resource groups to constitute your business unit, geography, business function, projects or any other organizational or business structure. Cost Insight leverages tags and accounts to establish accountability of resources.
Provide visibility into organizational spend for both CIO and line of business
Cost Insight caters to both CIO and line-of-business owners. CIO would get a quick comprehensive view into the cloud spend of each business unit and the business unit owners will be able to review their costs and assess their spending pattern.
CIO View: Cloud spend across various lines of business
Line of Business Owner View: Cloud spend summary for the business unit 
The essence of Showback is to nurture a culture of responsibility, lead the conversation towards bringing out IT value among lines of business and show opportunities for business units to optimize their cloud spend. In the future, Cost Insight will have enhanced Showback report with cost savings summary and recommendations, which enables self-service for a line of business owners to trigger corrective actions.
It’s all about cost savings
Once a VP of a large IT enterprise quoted “It’s all about acceleration ahead of optimization… until the cloud bill hits $1 million a month”. Public Cloud provides unquestionable benefits with agility, responsiveness, simplified operations and faster innovation. Though it’s a common misconception that migrating to Public Cloud will lead to cost savings. Organizations need to implement resource management, governance and automation to combat fast rising cloud costs. Cost Insight provides visibility into hidden resource spend and areas of rapidly rising cloud costs, by providing high-level visibility and savings potential overview. This is further accompanied by detailed recommendations, which are categorized by operational inefficiencies.
Idle resources
Compute and Storage resources which are not optimally utilized and idle, provide an opportunity to save dollars by taking snapshots and deleting the idle disks and powering-off the idle VMs.
Idle VMs in the private cloud environment will be identified and corrective recommendations are proposed to optimize such as powering-off VMs.
Unused resources
Compute and storage resources which are unutilized and exists in isolation without contributing to any business function can be reclaimed. The unattached disks and powered-off VMs can be deleted to free up the unused storage.
Powered-off VMs will be identified in the private cloud environment and corrective optimizations recommended, such as deleting those VMs.
Mis-provisioned resources
Resources that are overestimated to execute a specific business function and are not getting utilized to their full extent, a.k.a. overprovisioned, can be downsized or right-sized to better optimize the underlying resource consumption. Cost insight provides recommendations on ideal capacity requirements for users to act on right-sizing the specific instances.
It’s on the enterprise teams to make the appropriate planning and optimization choices to build the right culture, governance, and policies that will set up the teams for success in the cloud. Cost Insight is in line with a strong roadmap to assist these enterprise IT teams to achieve their goals.
Soon, Cost Insight will help to explore new dimensions of cost savings by leveraging discounts offered by public cloud vendors, recommendations on new reserved instance (RI) purchase, modifying unused RI instance, and generating expiration alerts. Look out for more blogs on these topics.
