Points to Consider in Cloud ROI

Author: Joe Martin, Date: 2014-07-14

Internal I.T. or public cloud computing? These are schools of thought that do oppose each other. You have probably heard some people asking, “What is a Cloud?” and certainly some have asked, “What is Cloud computing?”.

In layman’s term, the “cloud” is  the internet while accumulating and accessing programs and data through the internet instead of your computer’s hard drive is called “cloud computing”. Businesses are now slowly migrating their business applications to the internet and it is gaining propulsion over the past decade. They have realized that adapting to the movement is important since traditional business applications are expensive and complicated to maintain. It is a formidable task managing a number of different hardware and software applications plus hiring a team of experts to configure and set up the whole system.

Adrian Cockcroft, a former Netflix cloud architect, said that migrating to the cloud is more efficient and less expensive. It is equally secure to consider compute power as an advantage. Businesses need not build a substantial  I.T. infrastructure and because of this, privately owned data centers might disappear within five to ten years. On the other hand, Randy Mott, General Motors Chief Information Officer, is 90% committed in moving IT in-house. What matters to him is the span-of-control over the system since, according him, outsourced I.T. can’t manage competitive advantages using cloud. Looking at these two visions about public cloud computing and  Internal  I.T. business, it is a difficult business case to decipher since it may require extensive data.

When it comes to business, it is a different “cloud” so to speak. Return-on-investment models are not magical. Some businesses chose the complexities of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) licensing where applications  are subscribed for business usage over the internet. Users of these services plan increase. Cloud computing can be done anywhere if you have an online connection.

It is noted that within two years PaaS will have an 18-point leap in percentage, for SaaS at 25-points while for the IaaS extensive usage is up to 16% now  and predicted to leap up to 38%. It is presumed that the market would gain at least $100 billion a year.

For most executives, they must be sure that they get the ROI right to prevent themselves from restarting again in the future. A combined experimentation plus investment are needed to get started. One of the four areas to consider is data protection. It will be the core of every technological industry. Overall effectiveness will diminish if information and application will be compromised. Organization must live up to cloud security capabilities and compliance requirements because stakes for privacy may increase. There is also a list of employees that may be laid off. Internal I.T. stands that their way of storing data and maintaining it is less expensive and more secure. Cloud bursting is minimal.

A lot of IT infrastructure employees feel threatened by the public cloud and don’t assume that the future is similar to the past. Cloud computing threatens their livelihood. Jonathan Feldman of Information Week, asks CIOs if they advocate loyalty to their staff and those who build and maintain the system or solely to the business?  Maybe they should think about their future in the industry too.

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