The cloud, for many businesses a vital tool that’s transforming their business, but for financial organisations it has been about as trustworthy as Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
However, that image of the cloud being unsafe for financial data seems to be changing, with Adaptive Insights’ global CFO survey reporting that 73% of CFOs now trust the cloud – up from just 33% three years ago.
“The cloud enables a level of data access that Finance teams need in order to meet the demand for accurate, real-time information from across the enterprise,” said Robert. S. Hull, founder and chairman at Adaptive Insights.
“This quarter’s report validates that CFOs are embracing cloud technology for their financial data. However, despite this shift, the majority of CFOs still do not have a single source of truth for their organisation, delaying decisions. This lack of agility results in documented losses in revenue and business opportunities.”
Although there’s growing confidence in the use of the cloud for financial data, many CFO’s are said to not have yet “hit their stride in achieving a single source of truth,” according to the Adaptive Insights CFO Indicator report.
The main reason for this is due to the cost being too high, resulting in many continuing to use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or IT-managed data warehousing solutions.
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Given that CFOs expect to see an increase of 25% to 50% in data volume over the night five years, it’s probably wise that something other than Excel spreadsheets are used to track all the data, especially as Finance is increasingly likely to have to track down data points from outside Finance.
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Fortunately, only 21% of CFOs are not currently working on a single source of truth, however, that’s up from 17% two years ago and it’s all the fault of costs, legacy solutions and data sources.
The problem is that if finance departments don’t have access to all the relevant data they require they are unable to make timely critical business decisions. The report found that only 35% of CFOs are confident that they have access to the financial and operational data they need to make these critical business decisions.
