Regain your visibility and control over cloud computing costs

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Linda Musthaler.

When cloud computing was in its infancy, proponents raised interest in the technology by telling companies they could save money by running their applications on infrastructure they didn’t own or operate. In fact, some companies wouldn’t even need their own data center anymore! Amazon, or Rackspace or some other service provider, could provide all the computing capacity a company could ever want. And SaaS providers could deliver ready-to-use enterprise applications that companies could rent by the month.

With a value proposition like that, some companies started to jump on the bandwagon, using cloud computing in all its forms. Software, security, infrastructure, platforms — all delivered as a convenient service.  But the downside involved losing visibility and control over computing. Now, departments and even individuals can engage a cloud service without the approval or even the knowledge of the IT department…

Before the onslaught of the cloud, everything went through IT. The CIO knew the capacity that everybody was using, and the CFO could see the cost for each department. Now people get their credit cards out and buy services and capacity as they are needed. As a result, there is no centralized financial view across any of this. Ask a CFO if cloud computing is saving the company money and the likely answer will be, "I don’t know"…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/techexec/2013/061413bestpractices.html