Skytap Monday put a drag on runaway cloud spending when it initiated cost controls and policy enforcement.

Users of its hybrid cloud-based virtual lab platform - or rather the guys who pay for all those resources that developers are notorious for using if they're in easy reach - will be able to temper profligate use - like going on vacation without turning an image off - and have charge-back powers.

Skytap has instituted quota thresholds at the organization and user level and web-based transaction-level auditing capabilities by business unit, project or user so costs can be kept within budget.

Gartner has warned cloud users of the surety of overspending in moving from fixed costs to operating outlays.

CFOs need predictable costs and the cloud's elasticity, lack of transparency and pay-as-you-go model works against that.

Skytap now has an auto-suspend feature that can be set to suspend virtual machines after a set period of inactivity to ensure compliance with the pay-as-you-use model. It says VMs can be resumed in seconds to continue work.

Administrations can set granular permissions to control access to Skytap environments and the company says users can share VMs, files and templates based on fixed user access policies.

It says it's also got a way so CPU and memory can be specified at a granular level for each VM to optimize cloud resource use and so-called dynamic disks so users can start with a small virtual machine disk and grow storage as needed up to 2TB per disk.

It claims it can cut TCO by 50%-75% for IT labs for application development and QA and IT operations testing, training and sales demos.