Category: AWS Cloud Financial Management

Moving a college’s or university’s on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud involves a lot of change in organization, culture, and practice. However, in my experience as a former chief financial officer (CFO) in higher education, financial planning for cloud computing is often not attended to with as much diligence. Financial planning needs to be understood as a positive feature of digital transformation, even if it means changing how financial plans are developed and managed. In this blog post, learn four strategies to consider when deciding to migrate to the cloud.

Many organizations may not fully recognize or calculate the true costs of workload resiliency decisions. These true costs include the full spectrum of costing considerations that make up a decision, from readily-determinable accounting costs to less-recognizable intangible costs. As public sector organizations often have limited resources and complex missions, it’s important to understand the true costs and economic impact involved in a resiliency decision; this can help these organizations to both prepare and plan with their available resources.

As the number of research workloads in the cloud grows, researchers face challenges in managing strict budgets with unpredictable workloads and fluctuating needs. Researchers must be frugal with time and money to further their goals in performing cutting-edge and important research. AWS provides many methods for effective cost management that can support organizations in their efforts to optimize the use of grant-based funds.

Before building in the cloud, government agencies need to determine how they want to allocate cloud costs in accordance with their jurisdictions’ transparency requirements and legislative oversight. A cloud cost allocation strategy–deciding how to distribute cloud costs to the users or beneficiaries of those incurred costs in a pre-defined way—is a foundational part of any agency’s cloud journey. Even though every organization’s cost allocation model may be unique, there are some common patterns, approaches, and best practices that you can leverage to design an effective strategy to meet your organization’s needs.

Many nonprofits and other tax-exempt organizations need to make sure their tax status is correct across their Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. A new tax analyzer solution automatically detects the tax status of all AWS accounts across an organization. In this blog post, discover how this simple solution identifies which AWS accounts across an organization are paying sales tax, and learn how this solution can quickly remediate tax status by opening an AWS support case automatically.

With a new round of funding, the US federal government has the opportunity to advance the largest government-wide technology modernization program in a generation. As part of the American Rescue Plan that was signed into law in March, federal agencies are eligible to modernize their mission delivery with additional money available in the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). Cloud computing offers a variety of solutions agencies can consider for TMF projects.

Now more than ever, nonprofits have to optimize their costs and stretch their funds to maximize dollars invested in their mission. Often, nonprofits evaluate efficiency based on their operating expenses. For many, this means turning to the cloud to eliminate the upfront costs of buying servers and building data centers. With the cloud, nonprofits can better understand their bills, uncover foundational strategies for optimizing costs, set up budget alerts, and track costs and usage so they only spend on resources that they need.

While moving to the cloud saves cost when compared to on-premises IT models, it is important to inspect possible mistakes that could lead to unplanned cloud costs. Based on customer cost optimization consultations with AWS, some organizations have seen up to 33% reduction in cloud spending waste. Here we provide some tips and resources to recognize cloud cost optimization. What are some other common oversights customers make that can drive up their cloud spend? Avoid the following missteps.