Simplify infrastructure chargeback and showback in complex environments

Enterprise storage teams are under growing pressure to provide greater transparency and accountability for their storage costs, but delivering that level of cost visibility isn’t easy. Adding to the pressure are the shift toward storage as a service (STaaS) and the growing adoption of IT financial management (ITFM) practices. As a result, more organizations are looking to accurately allocate storage expenses back through to the business units and departments that incur them.  

To meet these demands, many organizations are now using governance practices to establish precise, data-driven processes that promote transparency and informed decision-making across their ecosystem. At the same time, these trends are also reshaping how storage teams approach budgeting, and the result is a shift from capital expenditure (capex) depreciation-based models to consumption-based accounting. This transition adds another layer of complexity as storage teams not only need to track usage with precision but also need to adapt their reporting practices. However, storage teams often struggle to provide the data and reporting that are necessary to meet the changing financial requirements for chargeback and showback.  

NetApp^® Data Infrastructure Insights plays a critical role in helping storage teams overcome the challenge of providing transparent, accurate metrics to meet the expectations of financial teams. With Data Infrastructure Insights, storage teams get real-time insights into storage usage patterns and cost drivers so that every dollar spent is accounted for and allocated fairly. 

Enterprise storage environments are shared resources serving multiple departments and applications simultaneously. This setup makes it challenging to accurately pinpoint specific resource consumption among users. The complexity is increased by dynamic usage patterns, because storage demands frequently change in response to workload fluctuations, seasonal operations, or unexpected surges. That complexity makes cost forecasting and budget planning difficult, particularly in storage-as-a-service (STaaS) models or in multicloud ecosystems with variable pricing structures.  

For finance teams, such variability creates significant challenges if their business is implementing or following ITFM practices to accurately represent the value of IT contributions while striving to minimize costs. They require detailed, reliable metrics to allocate expenses fairly and transparently. Achieving this level of precision is vital not only for gaining organizational trust but also for aligning storage costs with broader business objectives. Meanwhile, teams who are requesting or provisioning storage often have entirely different priorities. Their focus is on securing the fastest and most reliable storage solutions to meet immediate demands, with less concern for cost implications. This disparity in priorities leads to friction between the finance teams and the storage users and managers as both groups struggle to reconcile their differing goals.  

The reliance on legacy systems can further complicate matters. Outdated tools often provide aggregated, high-level data rather than granular insights into resource utilization. To meet finance team requirements, storage teams are forced to depend on manual processes for cost breakdowns and reporting, which are labor-intensive and prone to inaccuracies. Without tailored data, organizations commonly default to simplistic allocation methods, such as evenly splitting costs across departments or basing them on head count.  

This approach fails to capture actual usage patterns and results in frustration, pushback, and a lack of trust in financial reporting. Finance teams seeking a clearer picture demand greater transparency and granularity in the data that they receive from storage teams. However, without visibility into which business units are consuming specific resources, meeting these demands becomes an uphill battle. Lack of clarity leads to misaligned budgets, inefficiencies, and strained relationships among stakeholders, as well as missed opportunities for smarter financial planning. All these challenges underline the need for a more structured and accurate approach to storage cost allocation to balance financial accountability with operational needs.  

To help you map storage consumption directly to your departments, Data Infrastructure Insights storage infrastructure observability collects and attributes storage usage data at a granular level. Your storage team can deliver the data that’s needed to meet the financial requirements for showback (transparently displaying usage and costs by department) and for chargeback (direct cost allocation to individual departments). With Data Infrastructure Insights, your storage team can: 

• Track and analyze real-time storage consumption to identify areas of underutilization or overconsumption and to enable more precise cost allocation and budget alignment. 
• Eliminate guesswork and obtain defensible insights to share with your finance and business leaders for showback and chargeback.  
• Integrate with your existing IT and finance systems to streamline workflows and to maintain data consistency.  
• Predict future storage demands based on historical usage trends, enabling your teams to proactively budget and to negotiate more cost-effective storage contracts.  

Data Infrastructure Insights also supports your storage team by offering insights that help optimize infrastructure. Whether mitigating underused resources, aligning service levels to business needs, or allocating the proper storage to each requesting team, Data Infrastructure Insights helps strike a balance between performance and cost efficiency. Your storage team can unite the accurate data that your financial team needs with actionable resource utilization insights. With that combined information, your storage team can then help both your finance team and the teams who use storage achieve their goals and strengthen collaboration for smarter decision-making across the enterprise.  

The following example chargeback report from Data Infrastructure Insights shows the kind of granular reporting that your storage team needs.  

And this example from the Data Infrastructure Insights dashboard shows a VM overview by business entity.

Meeting the modern demands of STaaS 

As organizations adopt STaaS models, like the NetApp Keystone^® portfolio, financial transparency becomes increasingly important. STaaS streamlines your storage provisioning and enhances scalability, providing your business with flexibility and agility. To promote cost transparency and accountability, Data Infrastructure Insights brings clarity to consumption-based pricing models so that your teams can align their STaaS costs with actual usage.  

Data Infrastructure Insights doesn’t replace cloud financial operations (FinOps) frameworks but complements them with storage-specific insights to streamline financial accountability. The benefits extend far beyond reporting to help you:  

• Foster transparency. Enable cross-department collaboration by creating a clear picture of storage usage and foster a shared responsibility for optimizing resource consumption. 
• Save time with automation. Automate reliable reporting that’s tailored to your finance team’s needs and remove the requirement for time-consuming, error-prone manual data collection. 
• Encourage smarter spending. Align your storage spending with your strategic objectives and have the data that you need to justify future storage investments. 

As the intelligent data infrastructure company, NetApp has a suite of technologies that can help you streamline data management, optimize performance, and fuel innovation. NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights plays a pivotal role in bridging the needs gap between your storage team and your finance team. It delivers the visibility that you need to tackle chargeback and showback challenges and to enable your organization to allocate costs accurately and to hold departments accountable.

With storage infrastructure observability as part of your broader intelligent data infrastructure from NetApp, you can make smarter IT investments. If you’re ready to move beyond manual reporting and imprecise cost management, Data Infrastructure Insights is here to guide the way. To get started, read the guide or request a personalized demonstration.