Storage Chargeback
Financial accountability for storage use. Chargeback, which works best with a clean storage environment, is a fundamental decision companies make to associate explosive data growth with internal storage budget constraints. The concept that storage infrastructure is a commodity has placed many organizations in a precarious position, where the true cost of storage and associated operational practices have dominated IT spending. Without active management practices, internal customers are typically facing 60-80% storage capacity growth, while hardware price reductions are not keeping pace.
To recover some of these internal costs, many organizations will charge internally for their storage. A large enterprise with thousands of users maintains storage in each of those centers. There is an internal process of buying the storage and administrators will "charge back" to each of those areas for using certain amounts of storage space.
Because FileCensus gathers information about all data, it can determine specifically what is business-related and what is non-business related. Invoices sent to regional offices note exactly where the problems are and what information should go on their bills. Central office administrators need to be able to itemize bills for the chargeback from regional offices. A bill can be broken down into individual users and individual directories and files, by type of file, and so on. Then the regional office can clean up based on the specific items on the bill. It makes the regional offices aware of where their storage problems are and ultimately why they were charged that amount. The bill is part of the chargeback process but it is also a way of identifying where the problems are and where their storage needs to be cleaned.
This allows larger companies to delegate branch office storage management to administrators in those regional offices and not managed by one central IT team. The regional IT people are better able to handle their storage issues anyway. This frees up IT management for more long term planning and strategic efforts.