AWS Cloud Enterprise Strategy Blog

Category: Finance and Investment

Managing in Economic Uncertainty: Cost Reductions

Managing in times of economic uncertainty means facing difficult choices. Reducing costs is a choice that leaders often face but mostly dread. Many of us on the Enterprise Strategy team have faced multiple macroeconomic headwinds or other industry- and company-specific challenges in our previous roles as CXOs. In this post, I outline some of the […]

Opportunity

A conversation on expanding access to cloud skills for finance professionals

By Levon Stepanian, Cloud Financial Management Specialist, and Chris Hennesey, Enterprise Finance Strategist Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and their finance organizations are no longer just financial record keepers; they are key stakeholders during their organization’s cloud-enabled digital transformation. In the “CFO Series: The Sniff Test?” blog post, Mark Schwartz makes the case that a CFO […]

Is “Tailor” the Modern Solution to the IT Dilemma of “Build vs. Buy”?

To be honest, I’ve never liked the distinction between building and buying when it comes to software. Of course you shoud buy rather than build – if, somehow, there’s a third-party product that does exactly what you need, has the same roadmap for future development as your company will require, meets all your security needs, […]

Strategy for Efficient Cloud Cost Management

One of the most common questions I get from customers is how to effectively manage their cloud costs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers many programs to help customers evaluate and optimize their spending. The Cloud Economics team is fantastic at providing a detailed, holistic analysis of your environment and can identify areas of optimization and […]

When You’re Buying IT, You’re Also Selling

When I discussed a customer’s IT strategy the other day, they highlighted how the “unbelievably good deal” that their outgoing CIO had negotiated with a major IT outsourcing provider became a major liability. Being in the travel and transportation business meant that they were severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, having to pivot to new […]

Buy vs. Build Revisited, Part 4: You Might Be Asking the Wrong Question

This mini-series of blog posts has highlighted the nuances of one of the most common and seemingly straightforward IT decisions: whether to build or buy a piece of software. We learned that common notions of cost and lock-in can be misplaced (Part 1), that differentiators are by no means static and can be found in […]

The CIO-CFO Conversation: What to Include in the IT Snapshot

As I said in my last post, the way we’ve looked at IT investments and budgets has been missing some crucial context. It’s the current state of IT, the “balance sheet,” so to speak, that determines what spending and investments are necessary when considered alongside the company’s strategic imperatives. A conversation between the CIO and […]

The CIO-CFO Conversation: Capturing the State of IT

It’s important for CIOs to be able to convey the current state of IT, particularly in conversations with their CFOs. I’ve written before about the CIO-CFO dialogue and how it should change in the digital age. In the past, CIO-CFO conversations have generally focused on budget planning and execution, or on multiyear capital planning. But […]