Australian finance departments slow to adopt cloud

Cloud technologies are growing in popularity among Australian mid to large companies, but finance departments are far more sceptical than the rest of the business, a survey shows.

Only 37% of financial managers agree that hosted applications can help them reduce costs, the survey from automation software provider BlackLine shows.

Finance leaders are also unconvinced that the cloud can help them reduce the time needed to deploy new analytics tools.

The respondents did express a desire to improve the flow and usability of information for lines of businesses and agreed that their teams spend a significant amount of time collecting, entering and validating information.

Around 34% agreed that the time required to compile data undermined its quality and 31% of respondents pointed to a lack of IT resources as a reason information requests could be difficult to fulfil.

But finance departments have been slow to adopt cloud-based approaches as solutions for these problems.

“The research results show many finance departments are lagging behind when it comes to taking advantage of cloud computing,” BlackLine APAC General Manager Todd Hunt said.

“Clearly more needs to be done to explain how cloud-based platforms can cut costs and reduce application deployment times.”

Image courtesy of Ken Teegardin under CC