The impact of cloud adoption on finance teams

Beyond reducing the amount of planning and capital required to build and operate technology companies, the shift from large capital expenditures to a consumption-based expenditure model also represents a big shift in how companies and finance departments think about technology costs.

Building and running private cloud environments is very costly. It requires massive amounts of capital and significant time to activate that capital. Therefore, over the past couple of decades, finance departments have understood that when it comes to procuring technology, you should expect large deal sizes and for the capital to be spent upfront. This meant that checks needed to be sent to all the different vendors to buy the different components of the data center before the data center would come online. There would be months if not years of lead time between when a company was able to purchase something and when they were able to use it.

Given this...