Finance and accounting teams are often seen as traditional backroom components of the organization chart. But in recent years they have been joining the data, AI, and cloud revolution. Today, finance teams are making transformative and intentional moves from their mainframe hosts to the cloud. Not only are they improving their own process efficiencies, cycle times, and effectiveness, they are building new capabilities to improve data quality, create business insights, build innovations, and partner with other data science initiatives across the enterprise.

Moving to the cloud unshackles finance teams from systems built, in some cases, decades ago when data storage costs and computational capacity constraints forced leaders to limit data collection to satisfy financial and regulatory reporting minimum standards. Today, bringing modern analytics to their stakeholders creates new value but requires new capabilities.

Today’s cloud capabilities are allowing leadership to shift away from an operating model that requires an on-premise, in-office infrastructure with batch jobs and inflexible hard-coded applications. This supports a new way of working with cloud resources that not only makes finance run better, but creates entirely new ways to generate insights faster and make decisions with timely and more actionable information across the enterprise.