Cost Planning

A good cost accountability system is the basis of cloud financial management. It ensures that departments, business teams, and owners are accountable for their respective cloud costs.

Huawei Cloud provides you with a wide range of tools to help you more easily plan and track your organization's costs.

If you have a large-sized enterprise or corporate group, you can create a hierarchical organization with multiple accounts for unified accounting management. For details, see Enterprise Management and Organizations. With Enterprise Center enabled, you can isolate resources and costs on an account-by-account basis, helping you quickly expand business.

If you have a small- or medium-sized enterprise or you are using a standalone account, you can enable Enterprise Project Management Service (EPS) to manage personnel, expenditures, resources, and permissions in the cloud based on the organizational structure and service management model of your enterprise. If you have other multi-dimensional and fine-grained planning requirements, you can use costs tags as a supplement to organization planning. For example, you can use a specific tag to identify the team and owner of a specific resource.

You can use any of these tools to complete organization planning as early as possible and keep your formulated plan consistently executed throughout the operations of your enterprise.

As enterprises move more workloads to the cloud, their cloud expenditures continue to grow rapidly. Estimating future cloud costs becomes critical to planning. There are two types of future cloud costs: costs continuously generated by services running on the cloud and costs generated by new services, such as in new cloud migration or regional expansion projects. Cloud expenditures are variable. There is no one-size-fits-all prediction method, but you can predict costs based on historical expenditures and service drivers, such as cloud migration of service rollout or regional expansion. This will help you get a relatively accurate result.

You can access Cost Center and enable cost analysis to predict future costs based on your historical expenditures. Cost analysis of Cost Center considers different billing model characteristics and uses machine learning and rule-based models to predict costs and usage of all consumption models.

You can also use Huawei Cloud Price Calculator to estimate costs for your desired services or any combination of services based on their usage required for service rollout or regional expansion.

Budget overruns are one of the crucial challenges facing cloud cost management. After you make organizational and cost plans, you can make a budget for each business team and track their budget execution. By tracking budgets, each team's budget execution progress becomes visible. The difference between actual costs and budgets is controlled in a timely manner to avoid budget overrun.

Huawei Cloud provides budget management for you to track your costs by product, team, or project in a refined manner.

In addition to viewing the budget progress in Cost Center, you can also configure budget alerts. If the actual or predicted usage reaches the specified threshold, you will receive an alert via SMS or email so that you can take measures in a timely manner.

You can create a daily, weekly, or monthly budget report to inform relevant personnel so that the costs are always visible to the relevant business departments, finance departments, and CTO of your enterprise.