The adoption of cloud computing is increasing rapidly due to its impact and improvements in business processes due to its advantages. A lot of benefits can be reaped by implementing cloud computing according to one’s business needs. Cloud computing has set a certain standard for organizations to run their business critical applications on its platform. Now-a-days organizations can largely benefit from a cost-effective cloud solution which instantly provides on-demand services to clients at an affordable price.
Aligning resources with the IT budget helps in minimizing the redundant costs which are associated with cloud based services. IT heads do not consider the cloud billing system and thus obtain resources which they are probably not going to use. Cloud service provider allocates the resources demanded by a customer but even after the fact only half of the resources were used, the customer still needs to pay full amount due to the CSP’s billing norms which indirectly results in customer’s loss of money. Capacity planning is very important when you wish to use cloud services and distribute it among various departments in your organization.
Cloud promises a very cost efficient way to do business and it is the only reason why more than half of the businesses have started switching to cloud platform because it offers a great way to get maximum resources where they only have to pay for the resources consumed which is a better option than traditional system which needs upfront costs. Now-a-days cloud services are billed based on their usage and there is various consumption based business models in the market who only charge you for the amount of resources you have consumed. Metering of your used resources and costs affiliated with it give a very clear picture to the organization of current resource usage and spending scenario that helps them to take more informed decisions and this is also a good practice to measure your usage of virtual resources on the cloud platform.
Many-a -times there are resources which are unused like RAM, CPU and disk space for which the IT manager needs to pay the full amount even if only half of the allocated resources are used. The concept of Charge-back and Show back can help a business to engage in IT spending and value through responsible accounting of resources and the departments which consume these resources. CIOs want to analyze the resources which are allotted to each department and study their consumption through analysis because they do not want to pay additional costs for the resources which they are not going to consume.
Every department or individual who are allocated their own set of resources needs to efficiently use this IT service and should be responsible for the significant expenses. Charge-back system also helps organizations to achieve greater profitability by creating transparency in business decisions
Multi-Billing in eNlight Cloud Platform
ESDS’ eNlight Cloud Platform comes with Cloud Metering and Billing for optimum utilization of resources and paying for only those services which you have consumed. A true leader in Cloud orchestration software, eNlight Cloud Platform provides easy IT infrastructure management, enables customers to seamlessly deploy applications on virtualized resources, offers Multi-Tenancy and Multi-Billing models.
eNlight Cloud Platform’s Multi-Billing Module is consolidated with Multi-Tenant Architecture enables businesses to gather information of monetary resources consumption on business, department or individual level. eNlight Cloud Platform smartly maps per unit utilization of resources like real-time processor, memory, disk space and bandwidth and then provides statistics regarding the usage bill for the same. eNlight Cloud Platform provides multiple billing models, which suite almost all business models, they are –
1. Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume
2. Fixed Pay-Per-Use
3. Service Based Billing
Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing
When you consume certain resources & are charged for the resources which are allocated to you then it is known as Dynamic Pay-Per-Consume Billing. eNlight Cloud Platform provides Charge-back mechanism through its Auto-Scaling technology which focuses on the resources consumed rather than the allocated resources. eNlight Cloud Platform lets you deploy virtual machines which can scale dynamically as per the users’ activity. A user can easily allocate and deallocate compute resources whenever needed which directly leads to efficient use of resources.
Dynamic virtual machines use resources between the resource capping which is set. Minimum and Maximum resource capping is set for virtual machines to scale between these limits. Through dynamic resource metering, a bill is generated for the consumption of resources which were used based upon the per unit rates according to eNlight Cloud Platform’s Charge-back mechanism. A user can achieve maximum benefit through the auto-scalable virtual machines which will only charge them for the resources which are consumed.
Fixed Pay-Per-Use Billing
When you charge a user based on the consumption of resources then it is pay-per-consume but when there are fixed units (resource) which are allocated to a user then it is essentially a direct billing model which is known as Fixed Pay-Per-Use Billing. This is the kind of billing model which is implemented by the entire cloud market. On eNlight Cloud Platform, static virtual machine is provided with fixed resources which is equals to the resources consumed and the billing is fixed. This leads to fixed resource utilization, where the resources can be charged on fixed flat rates.
Services Based Billing
There are multiple services offered by eNlight Cloud Platform and those tenants who wish to deploy a certain service are charged based upon service deployment which is known as Service Based Billing. A particular service can be provided to a customer along with the resources related to it like additional storage services, backup, security services etc. This package can be a service which is offered to a customer and can be charged individually based on single service utilization.
This billing model is very different from the previous 2 billing models because here the rates are flat and fixed and will not change according to the consumption or allocation of resources to a customer. The flat rate charge-back model allows group application deployments and resources under one single financial plan for simple billing.
Conclusion
Cloud offers various services and there are multiple options to choose from when it comes to deploying a service according to your needs. The multiple billing models help a customer to choose from various suite of options which is fit for one’s business requirement. The charge-back model offered by eNlight Cloud Platform suits almost all the business requirements.
Proper resource utilization models like Pay-Per-Use and Pay-Per-Billing allows a customer to meter their resource consumption and not pay any additional charges. When a customer has fixed resource utilization per month then there isn’t a best option than eNlight Cloud Platform’s Pay-Per-Billing model. All these billing models put together along with Multi-Tenant Architecture; CXOs can experience a whole new level of IT resource management through a single cloud management portal.
