As your organization scales its cloud usage, managing costs can quickly become a tangled web of complexity. Without the right tools and strategies, it’s easy to lose track of where your budget is really going, making it harder to make informed financial decisions. Enter Virtual Dimensions from Costory—your key to transforming cloud cost management with the granularity and transparency you’ve been missing.
The Cloud Cost Management Struggle—Without Virtual Dimensions
1. No Granularity, No Cross-Cloud Consistency
Sure, your cloud provider gives you billing data—lots of it. But good luck trying to align those numbers with your specific business units, projects, or features. And if you’re working with multiple cloud providers? Forget it. The inconsistency in billing data makes a unified view of your costs nearly impossible. Without this granularity and consistency, optimizing your cloud spend feels like an uphill battle.
2. The “Black Box” Problem for Finance Teams
For Finance and business leaders, cloud costs often feel like a black box—impenetrable and mysterious. Technical billing data and cryptic tags don’t make much sense to non-technical stakeholders. As a result, these teams struggle to manage cloud costs effectively, leading to misaligned priorities and financial decisions that miss the mark.
How Virtual Dimensions From Costory Simplify Cloud Cost Management
Virtual Dimensions were created to solve these exact problems, bringing clarity and precision to your cloud cost management strategy.
1. Get Granular with a Unified View Across Cloud Providers
With Virtual Dimensions, you can map cloud costs directly to the business units, features, teams, or environments that matter most—no matter which cloud provider you’re using. This level of granularity means every dollar is accounted for and tied to a specific business outcome. Plus, by standardizing cost allocation across different providers, you gain a unified view of your cloud spending. That makes cross-cloud analysis and budget optimization a breeze.
Imagine easily distinguishing between costs for production environments and R&D, or allocating expenses to different product lines across all your cloud providers. For organizations leveraging multi-cloud strategies, this unified, detailed view is a game-changer, enabling more effective cost management and smarter, data-driven decisions.
2. Make Cloud Costs Make Sense—For Everyone
One of the most powerful aspects of Virtual Dimensions is how they translate complex technical data into business-friendly categories. Instead of wading through intricate billing data, non-technical teams—like Finance—can view cloud costs in terms of the products, services, or departments they care about. This transparency demystifies cloud costs, turning them into something everyone in your organization can understand, manage, and influence.
Getting Started with Virtual Dimensions: Your Step-by-Step Guide
Implementing Virtual Dimensions is simple, collaborative, and starts with a crucial conversation.
1. The Initial Meeting
It all begins with a one-hour meeting between your CFO (or finance team rep) and the head of DevOps. In this session, the finance team will outline how they want to break down cloud costs—whether by product features, departments, environments, or other business-related dimensions.
2. Creating Your First Virtual Dimensions
Next, the DevOps team takes those requirements and, using their knowledge of your cloud infrastructure, creates the initial set of Virtual Dimensions. These dimensions will populate the categories specified by the finance team, mapping cloud costs accurately to the right business contexts.
3. Iterative Refinement
Setting up Virtual Dimensions isn’t a one-and-done task—it’s an ongoing process. As your business evolves, so too will your cost management needs. New Virtual Dimensions can be created, and existing ones refined, as deeper insights into cloud usage emerge. This continuous collaboration between finance and DevOps keeps your cloud cost strategy agile and aligned with your business’s shifting priorities.
Ready to Optimize Your Cloud Costs?
Virtual Dimensions aren’t just a feature—they’re a strategic solution to the core challenges of cloud cost management. By providing the granularity you need and translating technical data into business-relevant insights, Virtual Dimensions empower your entire organization to manage cloud costs effectively.
Costory’s platform makes it easy to implement, refine, and manage Virtual Dimensions. Ready to take control of your cloud spending? Contact us today to get started.