Aprigo's SaaS IT Management Essentials For Storage Chargeback
Ah, storage chargeback. As an IT professional, it sounds like an ideal concept doesn't it? The idea that the different business units within the organization should pay for what they use out of their own budgets sounds like a beautiful thing.
But the chargeback initiative often stalls when IT is faced with the following: If we're going to do a storage chargeback, how do we know what to charge? How do we know whom to charge?
The Barriers to Storage Chargeback
In any storage chargeback initiative, you need to know the following
- Which users and groups are using the most space, and how much are they using?
- Which files do not belong on the network?
- Which files can be moved to secondary (cheaper) storage?
- How much are you spending on each GB of data?
The problem is that this information is simply not readily available to the IT organization, and the time investment necessary to retrieve and analyze storage usage metrics negates the financial gains of a chargeback initiative.
In short, the time, cost and resources it takes to run the numbers using existing tools is just too much.
The Problems With Existing Storage Chargeback Tools
If getting all the information necessary for a storage chargeback initiative were easy, everyone would do it (maybe not everyone, but many more companies certainly would). But the existing storage chargeback tools are more of a hassle than they’re worth:
- Cost- It’s hard to justify spending a lot up-front when the goal is to save money.
- Resources- When you want to maximize your storage space and IT resources, buying a storage chargeback tool that takes up space and requires hardware, infrastructure and personnel seems like a step in the wrong direction.
- Storage-Specific Tools- Until now, the chargeback tools available were dependent on your storage vendor.
