2022 ITAM Virtual Summit recap: Public Cloud & Cloud Financial Management

Day two of the 2022 ITAM Virtual Summit has wrapped, and it's time to recap!

The theme for day two was all-around Public Cloud and Cloud Financial Management (FinOps)– two incredibly hot topics in the industry right now. Why are these topics gaining so much traction? And how are organizations responding?

Dan Ortman asked the audience if FinOps was a priority for their organization: 69 percent of attendees said it was a priority, 41 percent had not started their journey yet. Our speakers dedicated their time to answering these questions. They demonstrated the importance of cloud financial management, the public cloud's impact on the ITAM role, and how it is projected to change.

Here's a quick recap of day two of the 2022 ITAM Virtual Summit - take a closer look at all sessions:

Is your cloud business case backed by data insights

– Daniel Feeney, Group Finance Manager, Azure Cloud Economics at Microsoft

We welcomed Daniel Feeney, Group Finance Manager for Azure Cloud Economics from Microsoft, to kick off the day. He wasted no time jumping into cloud economics and building a business case for FinOps. When considering a move from on-premise to cloud, you will undergo just as much a financial transformation as a digital transformation.

Having those finance stakeholders involved upfront is critical. You aren't just moving environments – you're shifting the mindset – and an elastic model calls for ongoing management. When implementing a business case for FinOps, continual focus on optimization and setting business KPIs are essential for accelerating value. When it comes to seeing ROI and the payback, Daniel says success in this area depends entirely on workload, how your cloud is architected, and what your efficiency is, which inevitably brings us back to management.

Megatrends impacting IT management and how to prepare your career for the future

– Martin Thompson, Founder of ITAM Forum

Martin Thompson, Founder of ITAM Forum and ITAM Review, joined us to discuss what the role of ITAM looks like in the future – especially as it pertains to the cloud. Martin referenced a graphic that showed how organizations (globally) plan to expand the function of their teams. Software asset management was followed closely by software licensing, proving that ITAM is becoming one of the most prioritized and business-critical roles. Whether on-premise or in the cloud, software spending is clearly a top priority for the C-level.

Dispelling the confusion - what is FinOps, and how to use it to maximize cloud value

– Ben de Mora, Enterprise FinOps Director at FinOps Foundation

Ben de Mora from the FinOps Foundation continued the cloud spend conversation, discussing the cloud economy and IT's new realities. Ben shared that cloud spending has reached a tipping point. Organizations now have cloud-centric IT departments – but buying centers are decentralized between IT and Finance even though there is a 24 percent increase in public spending year-over-year. FinOps is changing the name of the game – where engineers and finance are acting as one and procurement is instant, with a low cost of failure.

Achieving business value with the AWS Cloud Financial Management framework

– Eric Soelter, Cloud Economics Lead at AWS

When it comes to the business value of the cloud, it's not all cost savings. Eric Soelter, Cloud Economics Lead at AWS, shared that AWS research has shown that over 90% of business value is derived from areas other than reducing IT costs when migrating to the cloud. Eric called out Flexera's 2022 State of the Cloud report, sharing that the number one top cloud initiative for 2022 across all organizations is to optimize existing use of the cloud and a close second is to migrate more workloads to the cloud. To take advantage of these cloud benefits, organizations must reinvent the relationship between IT and finance.

Level up your FinOps strategy with automation

– Rohan Tyagi, Senior Principal Product Manager at ServiceNow

And to close the day, we had Rohan Tyagi, Senior Principal Product Manager at ServiceNow, discuss leveraging FinOps with automation. He noted that Cloud spending is on the rise, yet the time to build process automation is scarce. Nearly 50 percent of all FinOps teams (and 70 percent for early adopters) report little time for automation. Groups are disjointed, unable to agree on who and where cloud assets should be managed and who should plan and operate. The key, Rohan says, is to optimize hybrid cloud consumption – monitoring both software and hardware.

Short on time?

Here are the key takeaways from each session:

• Cloud decisions are now being made based on business outcomes
• Don't miss people and culture changes when optimizing the cloud spend
• Sprawl can take on new meanings in the cloud
• Just like SAM and HAM – clean and consistent cloud data is critical to making decisions