Why Your Finance Team Hates Cloud Computing

Automated backup and low installation costs should mean that finance departments embrace the opportunity of cloud computing, yet many remain lukewarm at best about the idea. The main reason? They simply don’t like change.

Finance team picture from Shutterstock

“My colleagues in accounting and finance generally are not early adopters,” Brandon Byrne, vice president of finance and administration for gaming portal provider Curse.com, said at the Oracle CloudWorld event in Melbourne yesterday. “ERP is going to the cloud last and there’s a reason for this.”

“When you make the decision to move to the cloud, it’s new, it’s different. Most accounting and finance pros want to horde their data and keep it in house — that’s the way it always been done. It has to do with the fear of doing something different.”

That conservatism is evident in other areas too. “Accounting pros don’t do Twitter,” Byrne said. “We’re very, very risk averse.”

Resistance doesn’t mean you can’t make the shift. “When you take the time to think about the logic behind it, it makes a ton of sense to go to the cloud,” Byrne said. Just don’t expect wild enthusiasm when you first propose it.

Disclosure: Angus Kidman travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Oracle.


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