The Hub Commentary_

Cloud ROI of 80%, I must agree – NOT.  This is exactly what creates hype and those short term cost savings in hardware and software manifest in long term management and monitoring.  Measuring business services and growth to the bottom line of your organization is a better measure.

As the author describes, cloud based computing brings agility to the organization to be flexible and respond in market time to changing conditions and leverage economies of scale in a shared infrastructure.  The second savings is not managing systems that are common to all organizations and provide no market differentiation for your organization.

However, in the rush to the cloud many are leaping, falling off, the cliff by not planning the management, monitoring and measurement in during development.  Agility is a great thing, but adds complexity and requires a strategy in measuring business services and monitoring the performance of your service providers.

No doubt there are cost savings and when deployed strategically, cloud computing will be the innovation that could drive growth into an organization.  Deployed tactically under the hype umbrella of short term hardware savings will only push some organizations off the cliff of doom.

What is your realistic expectation of ROI for your cloud deployments?

Michele

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A recent Microsoft “study” claims an 80 percent savings by using the cloud. This news hit the blogosphere with a big splash — it’s another positive outlook for cloud computing, and it provides some pretty compelling reasons to move to the cloud.  Not.  (Read Full Article…)