8 Ways to Measure Cloud ROI

Mark Skilton identifies 8 business metrics for evaluating cloud ROI in this CIO Magazine article. Which of these are your top drivers?

1. The speed and rate of change - Cost reduction and cost of adoption /de-adoption is faster in the cloud. Cloud computing creates additional cost transformation benefits by reducing delays in decision costs by adopting pre-built services and a faster rate of transition to new capabilities. This is a common goal for business improvement programs that are lacking resources and skills and that are time sensitive.

2. Total cost of ownership optimization - Users can select, design configure and run infrastructure and applications that are best suited for business needs. Traditionally this has often been decoupled when IT projects are handed off to production services. In cloud computing environments these are joined up.

3. Rapid provisioning - Resources are scaled up and down to follow business activity as it expands and grows or is redirected. Provisioning time compression can go from weeks to hours.

4. Increased margin and cost control - Revenue growth and cost control opportunities allow companies to pursue new customers and markets for business growth and service improvement.

5. Dynamic usage - Elastic provisioning and service management targets real end users and real business needs for functionality as the scope of users and services evolve seeking new solutions.

6. Risk and compliance improvement - Cloud computing green capabilities can be leveraged through shared services.

7. Enhanced capacity utilization - IT avoids over-and under-provisioning of IT services to improve smarter business services.

8. Access to business skills and capability improvement - Cloud computing enables access to new skills and solutions through cloud sourcing on demand solutions.