Speaker 1: Hi and thanks for joining me in this first episode of Mastering AWS Cloud Financial Management. I am Tanya and today we'll explore why AWS Cloud Financial Management is crucial for optimizing your cloud investments and aligning them with business goals. In today's fast-paced digital world, businesses are racing to innovate, scale, and stay competitive. The cloud has become the backbone of digital transformation, offering unprecedented flexibility and scalability. But with great power comes great responsibility, especially when it comes to managing costs. Cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control if not properly managed. That's where AWS Cloud Financial Management comes in. This guide isn't just about cutting costs, it's about aligning your financial strategy with your business goals, while ensuring cloud investments deliver real value. So why should I care about Cloud Financial Management? Well, according to AWS and industry reports, cloud spending now takes up a significant portion of IT budgets. And without proper oversight, companies can overspend by as much as 70%. Managing cloud spend is very different from managing traditional IT expenses. Unlike physical servers or on-prem software, cloud services are dynamic, pay-as-you-go, and can be provisioned almost instantly by any user. This makes it easy for costs to get out of control fast. In traditional IT budgets, where said procurement teams handled purchases, and the cost of infrastructure was a predictable part of your balance sheet. But in the cloud, anyone in your organization can provision new resources with the click of a button, and often without the knowledge or approval of finance teams. As organizations adopt cloud technology, the role of finance teams has evolved. No longer are they just approving budgets and handling invoices. They have become strategic partners in digital transformation, helping the business unlock the full value of cloud investments. Finance teams are now working closely with technology teams. To ensure that cloud spending is transparent, controlled, and optimized for business agility. This means understanding cloud pricing models, ensuring accountability across departments, and building financial processes that can adapt for dynamic nature of cloud usage. There are some key challenges that organizations face when it comes to managing cloud finances. First is the issue of visibility. Many organizations struggle to track cloud costs effectively, especially as they grow and manage multiple cloud accounts. Without a clear view of who's spending what, it's difficult to hold teams accountable. Cloud democratization is fantastic, but it can also lead to unexpected or unexplained bills, making it hard to predict and optimize costs. Another challenge is the highly variable nature of cloud costs. In traditional IT, you'd plan months or even years in advance for new infrastructure. In the cloud, resources can scale up or down daily or even hourly, which makes traditional financial planning models ineffective. AWS Cloud Financial Management helps you overcome these challenges by providing the tools and practices needed to manage cloud costs effectively. With AWS CFM, you gain real-time visibility into your cloud spend, the ability to forecast and plan costs, and a culture of financial accountability across your organization. But cloud financial management is about more than just saving money. It's about enabling your teams to innovate, scale quickly, and deliver better customer experiences while keeping costs under control. The tools AWS provides allow you to not only track spending, but also optimize it, ensuring that you're getting the best value of your cloud investments. In the next episode, we'll dive into how you can adopt your traditional financial processes to work more effectively in a cloud environment. We'll discuss the changes you need to make to budgeting, cost monitoring, and financial governance to ensure your organization is truly cloud-ready. If you found this episode helpful, don't forget to like and subscribe. And if you have any questions or topics you'd like to hear more about, drop a comment below. I'll see you in the next episode.