Cloud computing is one of the fastest-growing items in IT budgets. Since commercial infrastructure as a service (IaaS) launched in the mid-2000s, the cloud has overshadowed on-premises IT in both hype and growth. But many organizations have not maximized its value, because the rewards and risks of the cloud are difficult to balance without cloud expense management.
The scale is hard to ignore. Gartner forecast worldwide public cloud spending to reach $723 billion in 2025, up 21.5% in a single year, and predicts that 90% of organizations will adopt a hybrid cloud approach through 2027. At the same time, organizations estimate that 29% of their cloud spend is wasted, and 85% say managing cloud spend is a major challenge, according to Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud Report.
Make no mistake: moving to the cloud is not as simple as buying something off the shelf. It takes detailed planning and a comprehensive cloud migration strategy. Network infrastructure must serve distributed sites and cloud endpoints while providing enough bandwidth and security, and it must incorporate multiple service providers without compromising service or the value of the cloud.
Knowing this, it is critical to understand how to manage this shift in how IT is consumed. Here are the five key features every cloud expense management system needs.
1. Integration and Customization to Your Business Processes
Cloud expense management shouldn’t become a new silo in your IT department. You should be able to integrate it with your existing telecom expense management (TEM) system and build your current business processes into the platform’s workflows, so your team can report on and operate the cloud without problems.
How can you create new platform capabilities that work smoothly across multiple devices? The platform should be highly adaptable to your needs. Asignet solves this with Wayfast, a low-code rapid application development (RAD) platform with an integrated workflow and business process management (BPM) engine that covers the full cycle of web and application development.
Wayfast lets Asignet quickly create forms and business workflows for users, then enhance that first version by adding complex integrations or turning a web form into a sophisticated web app.
2. Reporting Flexibility
More businesses rely on cloud-based financial reporting to deliver information to stakeholders efficiently. Asignet’s cloud solution provides a central platform for every type of reporting: cloud expenses by cost center, department, branch, asset type, cost type, billing category and more.
Asignet also helps you reduce the risk of billing errors by sizing your services to your business needs, making sure bills are paid correctly, flagging discrepancies and filing disputes.
3. The Ability to Link Technical Architecture to Billing, Cost Centers and Procurement
A cloud expense management system must connect complex technical architectures to billing items, cost centers and procurement processes. Asignet’s platform provides a detailed analysis of how compute, network and storage resources are being used. It gives you visibility and control over multi-cloud costs and supports both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.
4. Provisioning and Operations
The cloud gives businesses virtually unlimited storage and processing power, often at a lower cost than traditional infrastructure, but managing it efficiently is the challenge. Asignet’s platform doesn’t just show potential cost savings. It also automates the operational workload, using robotic process automation (RPA) to automatically adjust the schedules on which cloud assets run.
5. Security
On-premises software remains vulnerable to technical failures, data loss and natural or man-made disasters. Data loss not only sets a company back in time, it can also be a major financial burden. Cloud platforms reduce many of these risks, provided they are managed with strong security controls.
A cloud expense management system should protect your data with regular backups, data segregation and access controls, so sensitive billing and asset information is safe from physical and technological disasters.
Learn more about Asignet’s Cloud Expense Management solution or talk to Asignet.
