A few weeks back I wrote a post asking, How you planned to measure your Cloud Computing strategy? In that post I was trying to help people understand that while cost-savings or cost-comparisons (between Cloud services) are somewhat helpful in making an ROI business-case, it may not be looking at the right way to truly measure the value of Cloud Computing, which is really about speed, agility and innovation for the business.
...and then an interesting thing happened over the last couple of weeks as I spoke at a couple industry conferences and started asking IT operations people how they measured themselves and their environments. [Hint: I may have put the cart before the horse...]
Usually I'd start out the discussion by asking people why they were considering (or deploying or using) Cloud Computing. Seems like a logical starting point since they were attending a session focused on Cloud. It's not unusual for someone to speak up and say they occasionally use "public Service X" because it's "really inexpensive" and they wanted to see if it's also applicable to their internal network as well. OK, fair starting point....so let's explore that a little bit more. How much does "Service X" really cost, all total?
Here's where the conversation begins to get interesting. Let's look at the things to consider:
