When you consider that as much as 10% of the average company’s budget is dedicated to expenses, it makes sense to track these costs as efficiently as possible. But managing expenses – and doing so accurately – is traditionally a laborious, slow and error prone exercise. Enter automated expense management. These systems boost overall visibility and control; making it easier and faster to accurately track expenses and comply with industry legislation. This is especially true when it comes to cloud.

Expense management for the cloud

In 2019, a survey of around 400 local IT decision makers revealed that 77% of South African businesses had already embraced cloud. And understandably so. According to research from Office 365, around 80% of IT professionals believe that moving the cloud had a positive impact on their productivity and a recent study from Stanford revealed that employees who use cloud apps are 13% more productive than their peers.

When it comes to what type of cloud they’re using, Nutanix’s third global Enterprise Cloud Index survey found that 88% of local and 87% of global respondents believe hybrid cloud is the ideal infrastructure model for their organisation. But as cloud environments get more complex, it becomes more difficult to monitor and track your cloud-related expenses.

Cloud expense management solutions manage all the costs associated with cloud, which makes it possible for businesses to control their cloud spend, maximise their resources, minimise wastage and reduce costs.

We have listed a few key benefits of cloud expense management below:

• Greater employee satisfaction: Cloud expense management boosts employee productivity by automating the submission of expense reports.
• Improved visibility: Cloud cost management solutions provide clarity around costs by application, department, or team. This enables IT and finance teams to work together to identify any wasteful or unnecessary expenses.
• Better budgeting: The right cloud expense management platform enables you to define growth patterns based on business expectations and use alternate scenarios to evaluate various instance sizes, regions, or reserved instance purchase options to help you plan for the future.

When you have a better understanding of your cloud environment, and greater control of your usage and spend, your IT team can embrace digital transformation without worrying about blowing the budget. This is exactly what we offer our clients with OneView, our automated Technology and Cloud Expense Management platform. Want to sign up for a Cloud Expense OneView Trial? Go to our Azure Marketplace listing, here.