The organization should have a strong financial management process in place to ensure accurate and cost-effective controls of data center assets and resources used in providing data center services. Financial management should be used to plan, control and recover costs expended in providing the data center services negotiated and agreed to in a service level agreement (SLA).
Budgeting
Budgeting enables an organization to plan future data center expenditures, reducing the risk of over-spending and ensuring the revenues are available to cover the predicted spend. Additionally, budgeting allows an organization to compare actual costs with previously predicted costs in order to improve the reliability of budgeting predictions.
The organization should have a schedule outlining the major budget milestones including target dates for completion of those milestones (e.g. draft budget submission, in principle approval, final review, final approval).
