There is no bigger buzzword than Cloud these days but what does it mean to the finance organization? In both the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites and the Forrester Wave for Financial Performance Management these analyst firms highlight cloud adoption as a growing trend.
Reality is More Subtle
The reality is that even with the growing acceptance of cloud, less than 20% of those responding to a FEI/Gartner CFO Technology Study (access requires Gartner login) were actively considering the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for budgeting, planning and forecasting (19%) or financial reporting and consolidation and reporting (17%). Yet, this same survey reported that “Cloud” was the 4th in the list of highest priority technology initiative for Finance (behind only BI/Performance
Why is Finance Conflicted?
So why the dichotomy? Only 20% are considering SaaS for CPM but yet Cloud is a top
It's Time to Explore Your Options
But don’t let being in the majority sway you from investigating your cloud options. There are a lot of compelling reasons to consider moving to the cloud and choosing the right deployment option for your business is an important factor. The different options that are available that you should consider are:
- Traditional on-premise
- Hosted cloud
- Private Cloud
- Multi-tenant SaaS
- Hybrid Cloud (part on-prem, part cloud)