The friction between finance and tech leaders is causing organisations to lose control of their cloud spending.
According to a survey by SaaS purchasing platform Vertice, cutting cloud spending is the number-one cost-saving priority for over a third of finance leaders. But only 9% of tech leaders say it’s a top concern.
In fact, over a third of the 600 senior finance and tech leaders surveyed disagreed with their approach to cloud spending.
Over half (55%) of finance leaders blame a lack of transparency, with 44% saying they can’t get a clear picture of the cost of cloud spending from tech leaders.
Almost 40% of finance leaders struggle to negotiate costs because of technical staff’s own relationship with cloud vendors, resulting in further friction.
However, 55% of tech leaders say that non-technical staff don’t have the appropriate knowledge or expertise to understand cloud investments. In addition, a quarter of tech leaders say that while finance staff want to reduce cloud spending, they don’t have the tech or engineering resources to focus on cloud optimisation.
This misalignment appears to be most acute in scale-up environments, with leaders reporting almost twice the level of friction than that of enterprise-sized organisations.
In June, cloud infrastructure and automation firm HashiCorp reported that almost all (94%) of firms it surveyed felt that their companies were wasting money on the cloud — due to over-provisioning resources (53%) and idle or underused resources (55%).
Almost half of the respondents blamed a lack of skills for unnecessary spending, which they believed would be cut if their company were to hire more cloud talent.
“Reducing cloud spending is a growing challenge for businesses of all sizes, so it’s concerning to see the disconnect between finance and tech leaders,” commented Eldar Tuvey, CEO and co-founder of Vertice.
With cloud costs rising by as much as 500% in a single year for some organisations, Tuvey said that it was critical for CFOs and CIOs to have a collaborative and unified strategy to make the most out of their cloud spending.
“CFOs are demanding access to accurate forecasting, with shared visibility and automation tools to help them act on cost-saving initiatives. This is of course critical for all companies who are struggling to scale their cloud efficiently, as they grow.”
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