Overview

IBM Cloud Brokerage Managed Services Cost and Asset Management (BCAM) is a governance tool that provides a comprehensive, data-driven view across cloud and traditional IT providers. The application enables users to identify and analyze:

• Assets and costs
• Spending and allocation
• Underused resources

With IBM’s Cloud Brokerage, IT leaders can:

• Perform analytics
• Apply global and local filters
• Assign tags
• Gain real-time visibility into true-life cloud inventory.
• View current and projected costs.
• Establish and enforce governance control points by using financial and technical policies.
• Define policies that flag when a defined efficiency threshold has not been met.
• Receive and assess variances and deviations before they become problems.
• Gain insights by using advanced analytics and cognitive capabilities.
• Simulate changes to inventory, spend goals, and operational priority.
• Provide visibility into assets across providers and provider services.
• Continuously identify and notify leaders with regard to waste and opportunities for cost savings.

With IBM’s BCAM, IT leaders can accurately answer:

• What does it cost to run my business? What is the cost to provide an IT product or service?
• What resources are my users consuming and how much are my users consuming?
• Where can I make trade-offs between quality, consumption, capacity, and cost?
• How can I align my resources for the future?
• How I can identify unused services?

IBM’s BCAM solution is a five-step process:

1. Connect to your cloud accounts.
2. Track the costs of the services, including recurring and usage-based costs.
3. Analyze costs and projected trends by using the Asset, Cost, and Policy data presented in BCAM.
4. Set budgets, governance thresholds, and policies for services.
5. Optimize your assets by identifying issues and controlling costs.

Tags are the most essential platform capability in the IBM Cloud Brokerage Manage Services – Cost and Asset Management. Tags allow assets and charges to be categorized and assessed. For example, tags applied to Budgetary Units can help users track costs per Budgetary Unit. Tags can be pulled into the system from the provider if you defined the tags in the provider account (provider tags) or defined and created on the system (custom tags). For more information about tags, see Managing Tags.