Yep. You read it right. Finance. It’s one of the things that you will find in the underbelly of your cloud transformation beast. It’s one of the things that can end the journey before you get started.
So here are 10 things to know and keep an eye on during your transformation journey:
- Hard Benefits of your cloud transformation are really hard to quantify, commit to and realize. Remember nobody will line up to sign up for that headcount reduction and your cloud vendor is probably trying to lock you in and increase their future revenue.
- Your talent/resource costs for the transformation will typically far outstrip your cloud run costs in the beginning.
- You need to figure out the opex and capex implications of your cloud adoption. Both short term and long term. It will be fine but you will have to work through it. And things are still evolving (e.g. FASB ASU No. 2018-15)
- There are going to be tax implications as well. Tax treatments vary by cloud providers, assets etc. The devil is in the details. Work with your finance and tax department on the same.
- Don’t lock in to long term rates for cloud. Long term commitments and volume discount % are OK but don’t lock into any fixed rates even if they are heavily discounted now. Competition is going to drive the price down more aggressively than you can predict & anticipate.
- Real cloud benefits don’t come from just cost reduction. They come from implementing business initiatives with accelerated speed to market & that leverages innovation provided by the cloud.?
- Don’t worry about vendor lock-in. Especially if you are building using cloud native capabilities. Its 10x cost trying to build something cloud platform agnostic. Go all in if possible.
- The cost model for Bare Metal, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS are very different. Understand the nuances and use case.
- Put in cost controls & monitoring on Day 1. Cloud bills can quickly climb in a matter of hours.
- Hybrid and multi cloud can lead to super complex environments and very high management cost. Keep it simple.
Director Intelligent Automation | LinkedIn Top Voice (AI) | Speaker | Strategy & Architecture | Cloud computing | LowCode | Supply Chain Transformation
3 年With sustainability in agenda for most of the leadership not sure if carbon footprint savings can also be a differentiation considered for evaluation ???