In the kick off blog of this series, I shared our top recommendations to accelerate your cloud migration journey, one of which was around aligning key stakeholders across your organization. As you move through assessments and plan your migration, it is critical to get buy in from your CFO and other financial stakeholders—even more so in today’s challenging macro-climate.

IT and finance organizations need to be aligned around how to be agile to adjust to rapidly shifting demands while ensuring that their cost structure is lean enough to weather tough market conditions. With this dual focus, it is critical to understand not only the technical benefits of a cloud transition, but also the financial and economic opportunities associated with it. Today I’m sharing my own experience of partnering with finance along with the wisdom that customers have shared about their journey.

How can cloud migration affect CFO priorities?

Here are three key areas that IT organizations need to internalize and align on with their finance organization as they plan cloud migration:

1. What’s the holistic impact to the organization’s financial posture?
2. What will the impact be on external and internal finance KPIs and processes?
3. What operational changes are required during and after migration to ensure that budget/ROI controls are met?

How is the organization’s financial posture going to change?

Azure customers constantly unlock new, positive ROI projects previously not possible on-premises as they migrate workloads. By design, Azure is built to facilitate business agility, creating opportunities for true competitive advantage and substantial decrease in time to market. As a result, our customers recognize significant financial benefits driven in large part by cloud flexibility and elasticity and changes in businesses’ financial operating models that reduce asset purchases and upfront cash investments.

Cloud flexibility and elasticity

First, Azure customers can adjust their cost structure to improve their organization’s bottom line, which is table stakes in today’s environment. In recent earnings calls, CFOs of companies not leveraging the cloud mentioned their inability to reduce fixed expenses, which hurt profitability. As our customers migrate to Azure, they are shifting to a cost structure that is variable by design:

Next, Azure customers can maximize resource efficiency. We have worked directly with large and small customers alike who were running on-premises workloads at very low resource utilization. These customers purchased assets for peak demand and lead-times, but most of the time those servers, and even some datacenters, were sitting idle and underused. By rightsizing and optimizing capacity when migrating to Azure, customers can realize economic benefits from cloud scale and elasticity. As an example, the built-in scalability in Azure has helped Maersk quickly scale up on demand eliminating the need to maintain idle resources during off-peak times.

_“Scalability is one of the big benefits we get from Azure. In the past, it might have taken us months to procure and configure servers and get them into production. Now, we can scale up on demand in Azure in a matter of minutes." _- Musaddique Alatoor, Head of Equipment Innovation, A.P. Moller - Maersk

Finally, shifting to a cloud model can reduce costs by enabling customers to consume resources only during peak usage periods, while reducing capacity when demand needs drop.

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