With worldwide public cloud spending estimated to have reached $70 billion last year, the market for cost management solutions is naturally on the rise, both in terms of revenue and the number of vendors looking to carve out a slice of the pie. The latest major player to throw its hat into the ring is Cisco Systems Inc., which this morning unveiled a new monitoring service to help organizations identify unnecessary expenses weighing down their budgets.

The announcement comes only a week after Cloudability Inc., one of the frontrunners in the field, acquired a dashboarding provider called DataHero Inc. to make it easier for business leaders to understand their infrastructure-as-a-service costs. Cisco aims to achieve the same goal, but it’s not limiting its ambitions to rented hardware alone. The company’s new tool works with practically any kind of off-premise resource, from virtual machines to Salesforce.com accounts.

Cisco Cloud Consumption as a Service works by scanning an organization’s internal network for traffic to known providers and displaying positive matches in a visual interface that enables administrators to quickly understand employees’ consumption patterns. Entries can be compared against the IT department’s approved vendor list in order to single out offerings that are used without permission. For convenience’s sake, the dashboard also shows a risk score next to the name of every unauthorized offering that is meant to help determine which ones should be tackled first.

The tool is geared mainly toward mid-size and small organizations with no more than a few hundred managed services used throughout their business, a focus reflected in its price tag, which only runs between $1 and $2 per user. For large enterprises with more advanced requirements, Cisco offers to perform a manual cost analysis that is more expensive and may take some time to complete but promises to yield deeper insights into how cloud expenses can be reduced. 

Image via Cisco