Do you have a surprise coming from cloud expenses?

COVID-19 has changed how our businesses are running and what our corporate needs are. Overnight, work forces have been forced to transition from office environments into work-from-home situations with little to no preparation or capabilities. Suddenly employees need more and more cloud-based tools to be connected and productive. Empowering your employees to find these tools on their own is fantastic, but who is keeping track of the costs? You could be in for a surprise in next month’s bill if users are managing these tools and subscriptions on their own.

IT has felt the brunt of these changes and at many companies are backed up with tickets, issues, and changes more than ever before. In trying to do their job, employees are making decisions on their own to do what they feel is needed to complete their tasks efficiently. They could be incurring unexpected cloud charges as a result of easy to sign up for services. A primary example of this is web conferencing tools. Your employees now have to figure out ways of working with their coworkers with no real water cooler around to give them a chance for face to face interactions and collaboration. Maybe they are unable to go visit their clients in person so now they are relying on web conferencing to maintain their relationships. Regardless of the reason for the use of such tools, there are very likely going to be new and unexpected costs involved which could add up quickly.

Here’s how… The free web conferencing tools may suffice for personal or 1-on-1 calls but the limitations of the free versions will soon force employees to upgrade to paid versions.  It’s quick and easy to sign up but who pays for the ongoing subscription?

And it adds up fast… The typical monthly video-conference subscription charge is $15.  If only half of your employees were to sign up for web conferencing services this month, that could easily be anywhere from hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month in new, unallocated, unsupervised charges, depending on the size of your employee base. If employees are not working with IT to select the platform, those charges could also be spread out over many new vendors, creating additional work for accounting departments, IT department, as well as raising numerous security concerns. Who is keeping track of what services are being deployed? Who is making sure that the charges are being properly allocated to the proper BU? Who is making sure that company data is protected in all these platforms?