By tracking expenditure, you can find individual system costs and tag them to the system or business owner. Transparent expenditure data helps to identify ROI and reward owners, those able to optimize resources and reduce cost. It can help you to determine what it is costing every month for a department or project.

Saving cost is a shared responsibility and you need to have a mechanism to hold everyone accountable for cost-saving. Often, organizations introduce a show-back or charge-back mechanism to share cost responsibility between organizational units.

In the show-back approach, the centralized billing account informs each organization unit regarding their expenditure but doesn't charge the actual amount. In the charge-back mechanism, each business unit within an organization manages its own budget under a master payee account. The master account charges back the amount to the business units as per their IT resource consumption on a monthly basis.

When you are starting cost control for your organization, it is better to start with show-back as a stepping stone and move to charge-back as the organizational model matures. For each business unit, you should create expenditure awareness by configuring notifications, so that teams get an alert as they approach the forecasted or budgeted amount of consumption. You should create a mechanism to monitor and control your cost by appropriately assigning them to the right business initiative. Provide visibility to create accountability for cost expenditures for each team. Cost tracking will help you to understand team operations.

Each workload is different; you should use the pricing model that suits your workload to minimize cost. Establish mechanisms that ensure business objectives are achieved by applying cost optimization best practice. You can avoid overspending by defining a tagging strategy and applying the check-and-balance approach.