In the good old on-premises days, things were clear: you bought a server, put it in a datacentre, and it was yours. If you were somewhat organized, you’d allocate the costs to the departments using it. That was called chargeback. But in practice? “It’s already running, so why should I pay for it?” IT was a fixed line in the budget, and discussions about costs often got lost in the fog of vague Excel sheets and nearly unmeasurable usage data.
Fast forward to the cloud. Suddenly we have usage-based billing, resource tagging, and cost explorers. It should be the holy grail: visibility, transparency, ownership. But guess what? Most organizations fall back on reportback. That means we tell you what you consumed, but you don’t have to do anything with it. A friendly invoice with no payment request. Meanwhile, the cloud bill keeps growing, FinOps consultants are working overtime, and chargeback remains a nice idea in the CFO’s PowerPoint deck.
And yet, something is shifting. Where on-premises IT used to be a black box (“ask the guys from ops”), the cloud is forcing us into grown-up conversations. About who consumes what. Whether that’s necessary. And who’s responsible. Organizations that take reportback seriously – who truly understand that insight is the beginning of control – almost naturally evolve towards chargeback. Not because of budgetary pressure, but because it simply makes sense to link costs to behaviour. “Why is there a 24-core instance running in Frankfurt on a Saturday night?” – a question that remains unanswered in many companies.
The beauty? This mindset is starting to seep back into on-premises environments. Because if you can see exactly what a workload costs in the cloud, why wouldn’t you want that same clarity on-premises? The tools exist, the data is there. And maybe – just maybe – that will finally bring an end to the sentence every IT pro has heard: “But why is this so expensive?”
Fortunately, there are tools that genuinely offer this kind of transparency. In Oracle Enterprise Manager, for instance – via the Cloud Management Pack – workloads can be analysed in detail, translated into cost, and (if desired) neatly allocated to the appropriate budget holder. These insights are also available within OCI and Database PaaS services.
In summary: Chargeback and reportback are not technology decisions, they’re cultural ones. They force us to take responsibility for what we run, wherever we run it. And that might just be the greatest gift the cloud has given us: not scalability, not speed – but a mirror. And in that mirror, we see for the first time: IT is not a cost centre. It’s behaviour.
Sandor Niewenhuijs is Regional Director in the EMEA division of Oracle GLAS. To learn more about Sandor, please visit his LinkedIn profile. To learn more about Oracle GLAS, please visit oracle.com/goto/glas.