Intelligent CIO APAC Issue 12 | Page 44

CIO OPINION
To gain full visibility , it is critical to have the ability to categorise all public cloud spend and usage .
Ben Allard , Vice President and General Manager for
Asia-Pacific at Apptio

How CIOs can solve the cloud ROI puzzle

Ben Allard , Vice President and General Manager for Asia- Pacific at Apptio , explores the challenges presented by a surge in public cloud services spend in Australia and offers strategic solutions to help CIOs overcome the resulting ROI puzzle .

As business objectives change and companies respond to market fluctuations , cloud services have become central to organizations wanting the ability to increase or decrease consumption on-the-fly , expedite procurement , expand data protections and capitalize on geographically dispersed ‘ locations ’.

But digitization has brought with it complexity and CIOs continue to face headaches when required to capture and report the return on investment ( ROI ) of cloud . The most common , according to the 2021 iteration of the State of FinOps Report , are visibility , team empowerment and applying cloud financial management ( FinOps ) principles beyond public cloud spend .
Gartner says Australian companies will spend AU $ 10.6 billion on public cloud services in 2021 – a whole year ahead of the prediction made pre- COVID-19 – as they chase the promise of instant , practically limitless capacity and the ability to scale with the press of a button . Meanwhile , total enterprise technology spend is tipped to hit AU $ 98.3bn in the same period .
Tackling the recurring conundrums takes a recipe of best practices , proper tooling and cross-functional business alignment .
Allocating costs for full visibility
Successfully managing cloud spend relies almost exclusively on transparency . As a CIO , you must be
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