AWS Cloud Financial Management
Maximizing business value with Cloud Financial Management
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Cloud Financial Management (CFM) is a fundamental part of every customer’s cloud journey. Whether you are building applications natively in the cloud, migrating your workloads to the cloud, or expanding your adoption of cloud services, CFM can help you achieve the full business value associated with cloud adoption.
Using CFM to improve business outcomes
Between October and December 2021, AWS commissioned The Hackett Group to conduct its global Cloud Services Study (Global 1000 Benchmark). Hackett surveyed more than 1,000 global organizations that have had workloads in the cloud for at least 12 months, to evaluate the business value of migrating from on-premises to cloud-hosted infrastructure, and identify CFM practices that help organizations maximize business value.
The whitepaper deep dives into the CFM best practices that top-performing enterprises adopt to achieve improved business outcomes. It discusses how organizations with centralized governance achieve substantial improvements in business agility, as well as why strategic allocation of cloud spend and a partnership between finance and technology are “force multipliers” for CFM. That is, when these are used by organizations in combination with other CFM activities, they have a positive correlation with improved business value KPIs.
Here are the key customer challenges and takeaways from the Global 1000 Benchmark study.
Top customer challenges
Cloud Financial Management is about more than just reining in costs. It is about how to embrace agility, innovation, and scale to maximize the value that the cloud offers to your business. Business leaders are looking to use CFM as a mechanism to:
- Deliver business outcomes at the lowest possible cost
- Increase revenue and profitability with reduced business risk
- Evolve from pure cost optimization to a holistic cloud efficiency program
Top takeaways
Migrating applications to AWS delivers significant business value in four key areas: cost savings, staff productivity, resiliency, and agility. CFM acts to accelerate pre-to-post migration progress and to increase the business value realized through cloud hosting. When CFM is performed well, it can also create a new level of visibility, ownership, and self-determination for stakeholders of migrated workloads. Top performing organizations implement the following CFM best practices to achieve improved business outcomes:
- Planning and forecasting: 35% increase in cloud spend forecast accuracy through detailed cloud spend variance analysis.
- Measurement and accountability: 74% increase in the rate at which infrastructure SLAs are met with consistent, systematic cloud spend monitoring.
- Cost optimization: 35% greater savings in ongoing cloud costs by utilizing cloud native pricing models.
- Cloud financial operations: 38% boost in incremental cloud cost savings with centralized governance.
- Organizations with centralized governance are more likely to achieve the most substantial improvements in business agility:
– 45% more likely to reduce the average time for production releases by 35 days or more
– 56% more likely to reduce the time it takes to reach actionable insights from data by 120 hours or more
– 45% more likely to reduce time to market for new application features and functionality by 30 days or more.
- Organizations with centralized governance are more likely to achieve the most substantial improvements in business agility:
Figure 1. Business agility improvements with centralized governance
Conclusion
According to the Global 1000 Benchmark study, top performers apply CFM practices more broadly and systematically, achieving improvements in forecast accuracy, incremental cost savings, ability to meet infrastructure SLAs consistently, and improved business agility.
To deep dive into the results and learn how you can adopt or enhance your CFM practices, read the whitepaper, and watch this AWS CFM Talks webinar, “Learn how top performers use CFM to improve business outcomes”.
Related resources
- [Whitepaper] The Business Value of Migration to Amazon Web Services
- [Blog] A conversation on expanding access to cloud skills for finance professionals
- [E-book] AWS Cloud Financial Management Guide: Adapt your financial process to be cloud ready
- [Presentation] How to design your AWS cost allocation strategy
- [Customer stories]: How customers used a centralized governance model for CFM