2024 FP&A Trends Survey. Empowering Decisions with Data: How FP&A Supports Organizations in Uncertainty
Click here to read the report
2024 FP&A Trends Survey. Empowering Decisions with Data: How FP&A Supports Organizations in Uncertainty
Click here to read the report
“Go to the cloud” has been a key building block in every global CIO’s digital strategy. However, as the CFO, do you find yourself getting into frequent arguments with them over the savings promised at the time of embarking on this journey?
As many of you have probably already discovered, the cloud has many advantages. It helps you to be more agile and achieve a faster time to market for new offerings, gives easy scalability and is economical so far as security, maintenance and other common costs are concerned. For finance, however, one of the greatest advantages especially for growing companies / startups is the cost variability offered by this solution. You need not be straddled with huge CAPEX investments each time you grow or have sunk costs when you exit a market. In the cloud, you can autoscale your consumption as a variable cost rather than a fixed one with significant flexibility.
However, while the Cloud offers a lot of solutions in the IT domain, the acceptance from finance has been quite lukewarm despite the advantages. This is mainly due to the often erroneous assumption that the cloud strategy would be a fantastic cost-saving opportunity. In the long run, if managed properly, the Cloud will for sure deliver savings, however, it would be naïve and self-defeating to assume that this is a pure “cost savings” initiative.
From my experience, below are a minimum few pointers that you need to understand as finance professionals, to make sure that your cloud strategy delivers the value it is expected to.
One-time costs
Recurring costs
In summary to make your cloud strategy work from a financial perspective,
Remember that Cloud is not only a technical and financial journey but also a mindset transformation journey for the company. Keeping the above points in focus should help you deliver excellent RoI on your cloud strategy, irrespective of your industry… Let the light come through the cloud.
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