When cloud adoption surges, controlling spend becomes crucial. According to Forrester, public cloud revenue is expected to more than double, growing from $446 billion in 2022 to $1.03 trillion in 2026 (Forrester). While this represents tremendous opportunity, it also raises challenges for finance leaders: how to empower innovation while ensuring cost-efficiency?
The CFO’s Cloud Finance Challenge
Finance teams must balance cost discipline with agility. Public clouds offer tremendous flexibility, but with that comes complexity in forecasting and optimization. Without tight alignment between Finance and IT, cloud spending can quickly spiral out of control.
Smart CFOs ask the right questions to keep cloud costs in check:
1. Are we treating cloud like OpEx, not CapEx?
Many organizations bring legacy purchasing behaviors into the cloud, over-provisioning in the belief that more capacity equals more flexibility. The reality: leased cloud compute can be dialed up and down. CFOs must insist on an OpEx mindset, where resources should be paid for only when needed and not pre-allocated.
2. Are idle resources wasting our budget?
The cloud runs 24/7, but many workloads, especially non-production environments, are active only during business hours. If you’re paying for VM uptime simply because the clock doesn’t stop, you’re overspending. And it’s not just idle time – resources are often oversized: one platform noticed average CPU utilization of just 4.9%, hinting at 50–70% potential savings through downsizing.
3. Do we have automation in place to control spend?
Growth-minded IT teams prioritize innovation, but finance must ensure there’s a cost control framework baked in. That means setting up automated, auditable scheduling of workloads containing start/stop rules, custom overrides, and clear cost reporting; team by team, project by project.
Enter: CLOUD TOGGLE
We built CLOUD TOGGLE exactly for these needs. Rather than wrestling with manual scripts, dashboard logins, or ad hoc tagging, CLOUD TOGGLE delivers:
- Automated scheduling that powers on/off cloud VMs based on predefined (but overrideable) plans.
- Simple subscription connection – onboard your VMs in minutes.
- A single UI for scheduling across AWS and Azure, with built-in RBAC and user-friendly overrides.
- Team-level visibility and reporting, with the flexibility to accommodate growth and innovation.
In Summary
Cloud adoption will keep rising, with spending reaching the trillion-dollar mark by 2026 (Forrester). For CFOs, managing that spend intelligently is no longer optional, it’s a strategic imperative. By shifting from a CapEx mindset to an OpEx model, eliminating idle resource waste, and embedding intelligent automation, finance teams can not only control costs but accelerate value.
CLOUD TOGGLE puts this power in your hands, without complexity. Ready to save on cloud, now and into the future? Consider giving it a try.
