Cloud utilization analytics and cross-charge
About Company
A global technology corporation specializing in industrial digitalization and IoT solutions across multiple countries. As a pioneer in smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 technologies, the organization operates complex cloud infrastructures across various subsidiaries and geographical regions to support its diverse portfolio of digital transformation services and products.
Services and Technology
Challenge
- Lack of cross-charge process and control over cloud costs (Azure, AWS, Google and more),
- Lack of cloud usage information.
- High cloud consumption costs
Solution
Elitmind delivered an analytics solution to provide usage information and invoicing for IT, controlling departments, and end-users in a multi-country environment. Business users utilizing cloud resources can now monitor their cloud spending, analyze resource utilization, and optimize cost-effectiveness. The solution provides a predefined set of reports and allows end users to create new reports using Power BI. Common and a multi-vendor analytical model is based on SQL Server Analysis Services or Azure Analysis Services.
Results
- Replacing manual and time-consuming processes with consistent and automated charge-back to IT and controlling departments,
- Providing daily billing information to end users, allowing for tracking, optimizing and predicting cloud costs,
- Allowing to measure global cloud adoption programs in terms of budget, resources, services usage and future investments using a common data model integrating cloud environments (Microsoft Azure, AWS …).
Tailored for success
"The biggest challenge was creating a single source of truth from completely different cloud billing structures across Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud. Each provider has its own data format and pricing model, but our clients needed to see everything through one lens. We built a translation layer that normalizes all this data, so now their CFO can finally see total cloud spend across 15 countries in one dashboard."
Our Approach
We developed a unified data collection framework that aggregates billing and usage data from multiple cloud providers (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud) into a standardized format, enabling consistent cross-platform analysis and reporting regardless of the underlying cloud infrastructure.
We designed and implemented sophisticated cost allocation algorithms that automatically distribute cloud expenses across departments, projects, and geographical locations based on actual resource consumption, eliminating manual calculations and ensuring accurate financial accountability.
We built a comprehensive Power BI solution with predefined dashboards and self-service capabilities, allowing business users to create custom reports, analyze spending patterns, and gain real-time insights into their cloud resource utilization without requiring technical expertise.
We implemented a robust analytical foundation using SQL Server Analysis Services and Azure Analysis Services, creating a common data model that supports complex multi-dimensional analysis across different cloud environments, countries, and business units.
We established automated monitoring systems that provide daily billing updates and proactive cost alerts, enabling departments to track spending against budgets, identify cost anomalies, and take corrective actions before expenses exceed allocated limits.
We created a comprehensive governance model that standardizes cloud cost management practices across all international subsidiaries, providing executive leadership with unified visibility into global cloud adoption progress and investment effectiveness.