Rethinking procurement

Imagine you grab lunch at a local eatery that provides several culinary options. You can either purchase option A, a sandwich/soup combo at a fixed price, or you can choose option B, the buffet, in a sense, but where you pay based on weight. Given that the buffet has a myriad of food items that you enjoy, you choose to go with the latter. When you select your options, you are sensitive to what and how much you put in the to-go box. On the other hand, if you went with the sandwich/soup combo, there’s less mindful calculation required because you know exactly how much you’re paying. This juvenile example illustrates the mind shift required to go from option A to B where cloud spending is more like the latter.

Those with cloud cost management success stories have already adopted this new way of thinking and dismissed traditional IT procurement processes. In the past (and even in some cases today), the relationship between technology and finance...