One of my early presentations about Cloud Computing in an international conference  back in 2009, was titled “Cloud Computing – Reducing the price of the entrance ticket”. I have shared my preliminary observations and enthusiasm about the potential of using compute resources and technology in an extremely elastic manner, without having to pre-plan, without having to pre-purchase. I really enjoyed the discussions we had after each of the talks I gave about this topic. One of the key points I always enjoyed introducing was the downside of the financial operation related to the newly introduced capabilities. Because while I could easily argue for each side on the debate of whether this is an evolution or a revolution in technology – I was confident that from business and financial standpoint we were about to see a large scale, high impact revolution.

It was then when I decided that my focus for the upcoming years will include a combination of technology at various levels – as well as business and financial alignment of Cloud Computing. I knew that the entire Information Systems adoption in organization is about to change. And indeed, it changed. From a flow that needed efforts prior to a major decision of go-no-go, to a flow that is almost seamless, sometimes allowing minor decisions to be made with a much lower investment in those decisions. From a process that needed a careful evaluating, selecting, planning, pricing and purchasing – to a process that allows for an immediate adoption of technologies with the click of a mouse, or with some lines of code.

Now that 2022 is right around the corner, I started reviewing my thoughts, observations and comments for Cloud Computing financials – from architecture and operation to what has recently been named FinOps. With my long years of experience covering a large number of cloud-based projects, in various scales, with different providers, technologies and methodologies – I thought this can save companies time and money, allowing for a fast time-to-market while keeping cost structure well aligned with the business.

I think there is no one correct approach for Cloud Computing financials. While one can justifiably argue that understanding it requires a deep understanding of architecture or a solid hands on experience – thus requiring technology-oriented teams to oversee FinOps as well, others subscribe to the approach of keeping FinOps a different discipline that should be owned by a different team. I will share my private comments on that on a chapter I’ll dedicate to the ownership of Cloud Computing financial processes.

While many organizations are either in moving to the cloud or considering such decision, other organizations have never had this decision to make simply because they were never outside of the cloud. I will have a chapter discussing the differences; however, I can say at this point that I believe the right approach for Cloud Computing Financial Management approach should not be based on the paradigm the company is coming from, but on where the company is willing to be once the approach is adopted and implemented. The processes should support the journey towards the destination, not the starting point. So, whether you are in an organization that has always been in the cloud, or an organization that has on-premises background, I believe your selected methodologies should reflect your goals. It’s true, though, that the path towards reaching your goals may require you to have a phased approach, adjusting your processes and flows as you go.

I will not recommend technologies, providers or tools in any of the chapters discussed here, for many reasons, the most important one being the fact that I don’t believe there’s a single truth for that, and at the end of the day any selection should balance between a set of requirements and factors. I will, however, share the way I think they can be evaluated and selected, and how to better clarify the requirements organizations may have when doing such evaluation and choice.

 The next chapters will be based on ideas and key discussion points, highlighting potential path towards what I see as a good Cloud Computing financial “behavior” – I will try to shed some light on potential benefit aspects as well as pitfalls of the approaches in question, allowing the reader to evaluate the different paths one can pick. You can look at this collection as a journey into Cloud Computing finance – and perhaps some of the ideas will resonate to you based on your experience. I will be happy to hear your thoughts, comments – or discuss any question you may have, as before anything else – this collection will be presented based on my personal passion to this topic, and to people who share this field of interest with me.