How to design your AWS cost allocation strategy

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Happy New Year! We’re super excited to be kicking off 2022 with a brand-new webinar series, AWS Cloud Financial Management Talks. We’ll cover all things CFM-related, tackle common and not-so-common customer cost optimization challenges, and help ensure that you understand what services, tools, and strategies you can use to successfully manage, predict, and optimize your cloud spend. First up: Cost Allocation!

Creating a Cost Awareness Culture

As we talk to customers, one of the most common challenges we hear about is creating a culture of “cost awareness”. How do you get developers or business owners (or really anyone) to treat cost as a factor in designing and implementing applications and solutions? A good way to start creating a cost aware culture is ensuring that the teams know how their decisions impact cost. Cost allocation is foundational to making informed decisions to best support business outcomes. To do this, you need to define a cost allocation strategy that speaks to your specific financial management process, and ties cost and resources usage data to the business needs and outcomes.

As we start this cost allocation discussion with a customer they often ask:

How do I allocate cloud costs to various company cost centers?
Which of my lines of business, teams, or organizations drove increased spend and usage?
How can I make sure end users are accountable for their spend?
How do I deal with shared cost resources?

The bottom line is: you want decision makers to understand what they’re spending, who’s spending it, and what they’re getting for their money. The result: more granular cost and usage reporting that delivers meaningful and actionable cost insights and optimization opportunities.

AWS Cloud Financial Management Talks

Whether you’re just getting started or you’re looking for ways improve your current process, watch our webinar, “How to design your AWS cost allocation strategy”. You’ll learn the concepts of cost allocation for accountability, why cost allocation is important to your organization, and which tools you can use to help implement a cost allocation process.

We’ll help you understand and find the right tools and strategy to better ensure your investments align with and achieve organizational goals and ownership. Watch it on-demand today.

Cost Allocation Blog Series

As we help customers better organize and report AWS cost and usage information, we have curated tips and tricks of how to leverage AWS resources to achieve your reporting and cost allocation needs. Check out our cost allocation blog series topics to learn more:

Additional resources

Whether you were born in the cloud, or you are just starting your migration journey to the cloud, AWS has a set of solutions to help you manage and optimize your spend. Explore AWS Cloud Financial Management solutions to transform your business through cost transparency, control, forecasting, and optimization.