Cloud computing has been proven to play a role in revolutionising how businesses innovate and grow in today’s hypercompetitive global environment, and the race to the cloud has enabled businesses to enter a new realm of speed and agility.
However, only a few are cashing in on the cloud’s promise to drive down costs, as challenges are mounting amid the proliferation of multi-cloud environments.
The problem is typically a case of too much spending and too little oversight. Businesses are struggling to effectively manage a critical new resource that’s vastly different from the legacy environment it replaces, with cloud use decentralised and billing structures that are complex.
Financial operations management has emerged as a radical new approach to managing organisations' cloud spending.
The financial management of cloud resources by cross-functional teams focused on spend accountability and business-value optimisation aligns cloud spending with business objectives and helps to ensure that the said teams work harmoniously to boost financial control and predictability, reduce friction, and deliver products and services faster in today’s consumer-centric digital economy.
With this, teams from IT, finance, and business units collaborate on data-driven spending decisions.
KPMG enumerated five mistakes to avoid in cloud resources financial management:
1. The lack of a clear, strategic vision that aligns KPIs to outcomes.
2. Not understanding costs and trends at a granular level.
3. Not using appropriate tools, technologies and tagging for success.
4. The lack of collaboration between finance and engineering teams.
5. Not taking actions, communicating and optimising
