Share your strategy
After your team has decided on the strategy and roadmap for your cloud adoption plan, you'll want to share your strategy with your organization's finance team and gain their support. Your goal is to showcase the benefits and cost-saving measures of moving services to the cloud from an on-premises plan.
Get started
The information in the following guidance is a reminder of tasks to complete before sharing your strategy for cloud migration with the finance team.
Gather data
Augment your business case with as much data as possible. Personalizing it specifically to your organization gives your finance team a view of how the cloud can benefit your organization. It helps to review your most recent balance sheet, income statement, and cashflow statement.
Identify a focus
What's most important to your organization? What business outcomes do you want to achieve? Cost savings and business agility are some of the topics you might focus on. Customize and align your strategy to your organization's goals, business outcomes, and greatest needs.
Use finance terminology
Use terms and acronyms familiar to the finance team, for example, capital expenditure (CAPEX), operational expenditure (OPEX), and double mortgage period. Using these terms keeps your your business case streamlined and prevents over-explanation. See the finance glossary for detailed descriptions of the most common finance terms.
Share your business case
Show the finance team your business case that includes a financial roadmap and multi-year plan. Your plan should reiterate your organization's business and financial goals, and demonstrate how cloud economics aligns to their financial considerations.
Your business case should be tailored to your organization's goals and business outcomes. For help with building your business case, see Create your business case and Strategy for partner alignment.
Answer questions
After you've shared your strategy and it's likely that the finance team will have questions that you'll need to answer. Some of these questions might be challenging, so it's an effective practice to consider what you might be asked and prepare in advance to answer those questions.
Common goals, drivers, and expected outcomes
Consider the common goals, drivers, and expected outcomes of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief Information Officer (CIO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and the finance team:
| CTO/CIO view | CFO view | |
|---|---|---|
| Flexibility | Cloud enables dynamic reallocation of IT resources from lower value IT projects to high value projects. | Cloud enables flexible budgetary allocation |
| Resiliency | More fault-tolerant options for backup, disaster recovery, and security | Lower required cashflow to support disaster recovery and backup |
| Agility | Higher capability of new technology adoption | New technology adoption without new budgetary allocation |
| Strategic value | Change IT from a cost center to a profit center. IT personnel evolve into consultants to business units, providing means to innovation, and time to market. | IT as an asset for CFO. New reusable processes, toolsets, scripts, compute images, and ways to increase business agility and innovation |
| Efficiency | More rapid service delivery to the business units, with focus on driving strategic value. | More granular activity-based costing (ABC), as on-premises cost tracking per workload may be fuzzy. Easier to target the costs per workload or application in the cloud. |
| Financial benefits | Cloud enables doing more with less, as budgets given to CTO and CIOs are typically constant or shrinking. | Reduced cost. Enables reinvestment opportunities into higher value projects. |
Next steps
Learn more about how the cloud can advance your business strategy.