The role of the chief finance officer (CFO) has expanded beyond compliance, recordkeeping, and financial gatekeeping toward becoming a strategic partner to the CEO and executive committee. CFOs are increasingly embracing their role in leading the business’s digital transformation, enabling it to leverage data, driving resilience, and helping the organisation to adopt smarter operational models.

For CFOs on the cutting edge, the cloud is a key part of the puzzle. Forward-thinking CFOs are working closely with line departments and their experts in the IT organisation to accelerate cloud deployments. Accenture research shows that nearly two in five finance executives said the CFO now leads the enterprise cloud journey.

According to the Accenture study, 90%+ of respondents agreed that the cloud is essential to their growth plans as well as to their ability to innovate and develop new business models. This reflects a growing awareness among CFOs about how adopting cloud and as-a-service models can help the business as a whole to drive better outcomes. This is tempered by the insight that many companies encounter unexpected costs and challenges as they accelerate cloud deployments.

Here are three ways smarter CFOs can help the business to unleash the value of the cloud while reducing the risks and costs:

Build a cloud-first finance function:

There is a perception that finance is a latecomer to the digital transformation and cloud party compared to marketing or customer experience. Yet forward-thinking CFOs are increasingly eager to embrace a role as stewards of data and analytics in their businesses. They are also eager to embrace technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation to streamline processes and gain a better real-time view of the business.

These CFOs are looking towards the cloud to fast-track digital transformation in the finance function. Cutting-edge as-a-service solutions are key to their drive to enable seamless and secure hybrid working models; get better insights from their data faster; improve productivity, and collaborate and share data with their stakeholders quicker and more efficiently. Knowledgeable CFOs also see embarking on their cloud journeys as a way to build experience as they work with other functions to drive value from cloud spending.

Focus on cloud value rather than cost:

Many organisations embark on a cloud journey as a way to slash IT spending. They are then disappointed when they encounter higher-than-expected costs. But CFOs should avoid the temptation to simply take a knife to cloud budgets across the board. A smarter approach is to use business outcomes to guide spending and budgets. CFOs can partner with line functions to evaluate how each type of cloud spending increases revenues or improves customer outcomes. They can reality check whether increasing cloud costs map back to higher revenue or other positive metrics such as customer acquisitions. This leaves room to innovate while keeping costs on a tight leash.

Encourage enterprise-wide FinOps:

CFOs should partner closely with the CIO to drive an enterprise-wide cloud Financial Operations (FinOps) approach to ensure that the business optimises cloud outcomes and performance. The FinOps Foundation defines FinOps as: “the practice of bringing financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud, enabling distributed teams to make business trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality.”

FinOps lets an organisation get visibility into cloud spending; optimise spending through tactics such as rightsizing resources and automation, and continuously improve to cut costs and innovate. FinOps practices are essential to control cloud spend as the organisation moves from capital expenditure on technology to an OPEX model.

We can guide your cloud and digital transformation journey:

A knowledgeable partner can help guide your business on as it seeks to unlock cloud value. At Nebula, we enable organisations to automate and simplify the management of heterogeneous technology environments. Get in touch to learn about our cutting-edge FinOps practice as well as our Nebula OneView solution for cloud expense management.