A theme I’ve been exploring over the past year or so has been the barriers to cloud adoption. Time spent with organizations using cloud has shown me just how valuable a move to the cloud can be – in terms of economics, agility, focus, etc. That being the case, you’d be excused for thinking that cloud adoption would be a no-brainer for all organizations. Sadly, this isn’t always the case and a number of hurdles stand in the way to broader adoption.

The drive with CloudU has been to put in place a broad education program so business and tech leaders and staff have the ability to understand the terminology, differentiate marketing spin from real substance and, bottom line, to ask their vendor the right sort of questions.

Some barriers to adoption, however, are technical and can’t simply be solved through education. Cloud computing services can be acquired by business units on a credit card, which can introduce a lack of visibility both within business units and across business units. This is one of the problems that Cloudability is trying to solve (disclosure, I’m an early investor in the company).

The thesis is that it’s hard enough to know exactly what you’re spending on the cloud at any point in time, let alone budget for the future. In order to provide some help with this issue, I’m moderating a webinar in a couple of weeks that brings together people who spend their working day thinking about this problem. We’ve got Mat Ellis, CEO and co-founder of Cloudability, and Tyler Sloat, CFO at cloud subscription and billing vendor Zuora.

It’s another in a series of educational webinars that we’re bringing the cloud community to extend on from the CloudU syllabus – in this webinar we’ll show you how to see what you’re spending and how to communicate that to the rest of the company in a way that keeps finance happy. We’ll talk about:

  • Tracking your cloud costs throughout the month
  • Catching spikes in cloud costs before they happen
  • Taking full control of your company’s cloud usage
  • Structuring your budget to account for variable cloud costs

As a bonus, everyone who registers for and attends this webinar will receive a free Cloudability account to track and budget for their own cloud costs. Feel free to register here.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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