Stratospheric Cloud Costs Attract Board and CFO Scrutiny

Cloud computing is expensive.  That’s not news to anyone that pays even the slightest bit of attention to the economics of IT infrastructure.   Getting IT capital costs off the books made cloud look like an attractive financial option a decade ago, but the public cloud providers have long since stopped pretending that they offer cost savings.  They appear to consider the convenience, reach, and near-immediate scalability of the cloud as luxury items worth paying for.  

But the recent CFO Cloud Survey & Report, commissioned by azul and brought to our attention by Channel Insider, provides numerous data points supporting a growing trend of executive concern over high cloud costs and the financial impact of them. 

A full 66% of the 400 CFOs and other finance leaders of large companies surveyed reported their organizations cloud spending level as a “board-level concern.”  The executives also replied to a request for their organization’s top cloud-related priorities in the next 12 months from a list of nine possibilities as (#1) improving performance and uptime (understandable given the continuing rash of cloud outages), (#2) reducing overall cloud costs, and (#3) maximizing profitable growth from cloud investment.   Cost was preeminent in their concerns throughout the survey, which is worth reading in its entirety. 

With costly AI and automation initiatives to fund in an effort to position their organizations for the future, CFOs and board members are no longer in grin & bear it mode when it comes to their cloud bills.  If your financial leadership and board shares the concerns of so many of their colleagues you may want to take a look at the Direct LTx executive report Cloud Challenges, which examines whether public cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are the right financial and operational fit for your business.