Departmental Billing for Microsoft 365 Backup

If you're a large organization with multiple departments and want to manage Microsoft 365 Backup within departments or groups, departmental billing may be the right fit for you. With Departmental billing, you can manage Backup with the following features:

1. Breakdown backup costs by different azure subscriptions.
2. Limit Backup management (creation and update) to certain admins within departments with Role-based-access-control(RBAC).
3. Prevent admins from another department using your azure subscription to cause unapproved backup charges.

Role-Based-Access-Control within departments(RBAC): To limit admins who can manage Backup within a department or group, every backup admin should also have an Owner or Contributor role on the subscription. This way only an approved admin who is given spending power on a subscription can create and edit backups and cause consumption to the department's azure subscription. If you're an owner for the department's subscription, we recommend giving the lower privileged 'Contributor' role to backup admins in your department if they don't need privileges to add other admins to the subscription.

Set up departmental billing

To set up departmental billing for your tenant, follow these steps.

1. Create billing policies and connect them to Microsoft 365 Backup following the instructions in Pay-as-you-go Setup for Microsoft 365 Backup.

2. In the Services tab of Pay-as-you-go page, select Microsoft 365 Backup.

3. To enable departmental billing, in the Settings tab of Microsoft 365 Backup page, select the checkbox for limiting management of Backup within departments.

   

   Now that departmental billing with Backup is enabled for your tenant, Admins are assigned Owner / Contributor Azure roles to the billing policies connected to Backup can only create and edit backup policies.

4. You can create backup for your department by creating backup policies as outlined here. In Create / Edit policy wizard, admins need to associate a Billing Policy with a Backup Policy. In the billing policy list, admins are shown only billing policies that they have Owner/Contributor access.
   

Admins who don't have RBAC rights to your backup policies will not be able to use your billing policy to create backup policies or edit backup policies created by admins in your department. Billing policies show as Confidential for admins who don't have access.

Change Billing policies associated with Backup policies

Once a Billing Policy is associated with a Backup Policy, it can be updated from the Backup Dashboard

1. Select the Backup policy you want to update the Billing Policy. Click on the 3-dots next to backup policy name and select Update Billing policy.

Disable departmental billing

If you wish to manage Backup without the RBAC control of restricting Backup management to Owner or Contributor of subscriptions, uncheck the box in Settings tab Microsoft 365 Backup page.

Manage consumption and invoices for Microsoft 365 Backup

You can view actual and accumulated cost breakdown by tenants and service type for OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange in Microsoft Cost Management in the Azure portal or by accessing the Cost Management public APIs. Cost breakdown by application ID is coming soon.

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

2. Search for Cost Management + Billing.

3. Select Cost analysis to see:

   • Accumulated cost and forecast cost.

   • Select +Add Filter to see breakdown of cost by meters and tags.

     

You can also export daily cost information using billing export feature in Azure portal. For more information, see Tutorial: Create and manage exported data.

Billing attribution by tenants, service type, and applications

You can see actual cost breakdown by tags in Azure portal. There are currently two tags available for Microsoft 365 Backup: tenants and servicetype.

To view tags:

1. Select +Add Filter to see breakdown of cost by meters and tags.

2. Select the tag:

   • In the key-value pair, select tenants or servicetype, and then select the respective tenant ID or service type.

     • tenants shows a list of tenant IDs.

     • servicetype is OneDrive, SharePoint, or Exchange.

     • applications shows a list of app IDs.

     • Exchange mailbox - Not available.

     • OneDrive account - SiteId of the corresponding OneDrive site.

     • SharePoint site - SiteId of the corresponding SharePoint site.

   • Azure cost analysis - filter by tag.

   • The tag for OneDrive is its siteID. To convert this back to a userID, you can use the following API: https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/<siteid>/drive?select=owner

3. In the left navigation, select Billing to see monthly invoices.

   We recommend using this view to see the costs by resources for Microsoft 365 Backup.

   

4. Set up budget alerts on cost by following the steps in the Cost Management public APIs.