The Doppler Quarterly Special Edition 2019 | Page 43

Cloud Financial Maturity Spectrum
TYPES OF COSTS: Infrastructure Costs • One-Time Costs • Accounting Impacts • Avoided Costs
On-Going
Support
(MSP) Understanding
'True' On-
Premises Costs Cost-Saving
Method
Implementation
(Sustained Usage,
etc.) Platform and
Operating
Environment
Build Out Business Agility
and Global
Capabilities Reputation and
Brand Value
Infrastructure
Costs (Compute,
Network, Storage) Identifying
Open Source
Opportunities Migration Costs
(Applications and
Data) CapEx vs. OpEx
Impacts Improved
Availability,
Redundancy, and
Security Staff and Process
Costs, Talent
Recruitment
Right-sizing
Application
Footprints for
Optimization Identifying
Applications to
Retire Data Center
Shutdown Costs Depreciation
Impacts to
Accountin Application Cost
Allocation and
Tracking ROI Developer
Productivity
Impact on
Revenue
LESS MATURE
MORE MATURE
Figure 2: Achieving Cloud Financial Maturity
4) Your individual perspective on agility.
Finally, it is also important to take into consideration how different individuals at the
same company view the benefits of agility. A CIO’s perspective will vary widely com-
pared to how a head of Infrastructure or head of engineering values their organization’s
ability to change. This is a key nuance that greatly affects investment decisions. The
most successful companies focus on the overarching business agility the cloud provides,
a strategic perspective that is generally in line with how CIOs view their organization’s
ability to change.
What We’re Seeing
The value of the cloud scales with the value that its agility brings to your business. In
other words, the faster an industry needs to change, the more value cloud brings. No
matter the industry, achieving financial maturity during cloud adoption is challenging
and requires exploring all the economic considerations we’ve already discussed.
We see that a company’s cloud financial maturity on their cloud investment follows a
consistent flow as the company matures. Companies early on in their cloud journey are
focused on identifying hard costs and other clear cloud value drivers, which are easier
to identify but provide a limited perspective to total ROI. Figure 2 depicts these consid-
erations in light green at the beginning of the spectrum. As companies mature through
their economic analysis and cloud adoption journey, their financial maturity increases as
they start to understand the value of agility and other soft costs, which are depicted in
dark green.
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