6 01732 759725 NEWS ...continued CFOs take ownership as cloud becomes financial risk factor Cloud infrastructure costs are now one of the biggest sources of financial volatility and margin erosion amongst technology companies, causing CFOs to tighten their grip on cloud governance and decision-making. So says Cloud Capital in its new report, The Cost of Compute: What 100 CFOs Reveal About Cloud Infrastructure’s Impact on the P&L. Its survey of 100 CFOs and senior finance decision-makers in technology companies with 50-1,000 employees in the UK and US reveals that cloud infrastructure spend already averages nearly 10% of revenue, making it the second-largest expense for tech companies after staff salaries. AI workloads, which make up 22% of total cloud spending, are a big factor in higher cloud costs. In AI-native companies cloud spend can be as high as 30-40% of revenue, compared to 6-12% of revenue in traditional SaaS companies. Over the last 18 months businesses have addressed rising costs by moving cloud cost management from engineering teams into finance, with CFOs either assuming responsibility for cloud spend directly or implementing joint Finance– Engineering ownership models. Cloud Capital says that when Finance gets involved in cloud cost management, forecast predictability doubles, with 32% of Financeinvolved teams achieving highly predictable forecasts (less than 5% monthly variance) compared to 16% of Engineering-owned teams. COGS confidence increases 50% and reported visibility improves 25%. Edward Barrow, CEO and CoFounder at Cloud Capital, said: “CFOs report month-to-month variability of 5-10% as standard. Right now, cloud’s unpredictability is disproportionate to its size and completely out of line with what CFOs expect from any other major expense. That’s the financial tension driving this shift toward tighter governance and Finance ownership.” www.cloudcapital.co … Culture rot – what to look for ‘Culture rot’ – the slow erosion of culture and values that once made an organisation successful, leading to the development of a ‘toxic’ or dysfunctional work environment – is rife in UK businesses, warns global recruitment and talent management company Robert Walters. It says that 54% of UK professionals already recognise ‘culture rot’ as a significant problem in their workplace, with a further 28% saying they’ve noticed its warning signs. Symptoms include limited incentives or rewards (41%), poor collaboration across the company (36%) and unclear or broken-down communications (23%). Lucy Bisset, Director of Robert Walters North, said: “When values erode and morale dips, businesses lose their edge. This isn’t a case of dramatic failure, instead success is slowly diminished through everyday disengagement, broken communication loops and declining incentives.” Danger signs highlighted in Robert Walters’ Employee Benefits Guide include the fact that only 37% of professionals were happy with the bonus they received this year; 76% report that their benefits packages have been ‘scaled back’; and only 14% now feel aligned with their company’s values and workplace culture. Four out of five employers (81%) agree that companywide cost cutting has significantly weakened overall work culture. www.robertwalters.co.uk … Jobseekers turn to the dark side A static UK jobs market is helping to fuel recruitment on the dark web, warns Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence in a new report Inside the dark web job market: Their talent, our threat. It says that the number of resumes and jobs posted on underground forums, which doubled between Q1 2023 and Q1 2024, remains high, boosted by a growing influx of laidoff workers, teenagers and skilled professionals, with a median age of 24. Resumes currently outnumber vacancies at a ratio of 55:45. The most in-demand IT roles posted by employers include developers to create attack tools (17%), penetration testers to probe networks for weaknesses (12%), money launderers to clean illicit funds through layered transactions (11%), carders to steal and monetise payment data (6%) and traffers to drive victims to phishing sites or infected downloads (5%). dfi.kaspersky.com SCC’s Alex Welch sets record for Namib Desert ultramarathon Manchester-based ultra-athlete Alex Welch, who works as a Senior Cyber Security Sales Specialist at technology solutions and services provider SCC, has won the 2025 Beyond the Ultimate Desert Ultra and set a record for the five-day, 250km race across the Namib Desert. Renowned as one of the world’s harshest deserts, the Namib features an energy-sapping mix of towering sand dunes, scrubland and exposed plains and, at this time of year, daytime temperatures of up to 58°C and nearfreezing nights. The race features five stages of 50km, 50km, 42km, 22km and 92km, and athletes must carry all the food, supplies and mandatory equipment they will need over the five days. Earlier this year, Alex became the youngest-ever winner of the Beyond the Ultimate Arctic Ultra and secured a podium finish in the Mountain Ultra in Kyrgyzstan. www.scc.com
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