Aviatrix Releases Tool To Help Enterprises Prevent Cloud Network Costs Spiraling

Cloud networking outfit Aviatrix has extended its platform with a new capability that monitors network usage to help enterprises more accurately track costs and enable chargeback to individual departments.

Aviatrix said that the new feature, called CostIQ, uses distributed telemetry that is built into its cloud network platform to measure the use of shared cloud network resources by customer organizations. Based on this, the tool can provide chargeback or showback documents for line-of-business owners and IT teams, it is claimed.

According to Aviatrix, controlling cloud costs is becoming a greater concern for many organizations. This is understandable, given the worsening economic outlook and that public cloud providers are expected to significantly bump up their prices next year in response to the rising cost of energy and other expenses.

The company cites figures from research outfit Futuriom that 63 percent of enterprises see managing cloud usage costs as an urgent priority, but that IT teams may lack the capability to accurately measure costs or allocate them based on actual usage.

To address this, CostIQ adds the ability to track actual network traffic from user sites to cloud resources, Aviatrix said, in order to create an accurate breakdown of accounts or subscriptions using those cloud resources.

Most enterprises simply divide the cost between departments or allocate it to the IT team, according to Aviatrix VP of Solutions Marketing Rod Stuhlmuller.

"Without telemetry to understand which parts of the business are using which resources, especially when looking at multiple clouds, enterprises don't have the information they need to allocate the costs of shared cloud resources," he claimed.

CostIQ builds on the features in Aviatrix Intelligent Cloud Networking, the company said. This was developed to offer enhanced network performance, security, and visibility for customers across multiple cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle, and Alibaba clouds.

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This is all well and good, of course, but organizations will be looking for tools that work across platforms and have a need to track all cloud usage, not just networking functions.

"It's a good start – but only a start," independent analyst Clive Longbottom told us. "Networking is only a small part of the overall cost equation, and only having visibility of that doesn't really give the depth of visibility that companies are looking for."

But everything has to start somewhere, Longbottom added, and thus any real-time view into costs has to be applauded. "As time goes on, we may get to see tools that cover more resources across more platforms, perhaps backed up by some form of AI that can try and maintain the tricky link between the levers of cost, performance and availability."

However, Sid Nag, Gartner Vice President for Cloud Services and Technologies, said that CostIQ isn't just for networking.

"It's a showback and chargeback capability for all shared services such as firewalling, application acceleration, and other NFV/VNF type functions," he said.

Furthermore, it is able to break down the utilization and associated costs by user and department, while cloud providers typically only bill at the account/company level only, he added. ®