Measuring The Business Value Of Cloud Computing

The importance of demonstrating the value achieved from IT investments is long established in the Computer Science (CS) and Information Systems (IS) literature. However, emerging technologies such as the ever-changing complex area of cloud computing present new challenges and opportunities for demonstrating how IT investments lead to business value. Recent reviews of extant literature highlights the need for multi-disciplinary research. This research should explore and further develops the conceptualization of value in cloud computing research. In addition, there is a need for research which investigates how IT value manifests itself across the chain of service provision and in inter-organizational scenarios. This open access book will review the state of the art from an IS, Computer Science and Accounting perspective, will introduce and discuss the main techniques for measuring business value for cloud computing in a variety of scenarios, and illustrate these with mini-case studies.

The Economics of Cloud Computing An Overview for Decision Makers Bill Williams Foreword by George Reese, author of Cloud Application Architectures The decision-maker’s guide to cloud computing: from making the case to managing the transition This concise book delivers the insight and tools you need to make intelligent decisions about cloud computing and effectively manage the transition to this new paradigm. Bill Williams explains how cloud computing platforms are transforming business IT and helps you fully understand the economies of scale and other benefits associated with “the cloud.” Williams defines and explains cloud computing platforms and technologies, analyzes the costs associated with the IT supply chain, and (using industry standard metrics) creates a process for measuring the value of implementing cloud service models. He presents realistic and up-to-date ROI and NPV calculations comparing cloud strategies with conventional investments in owned/leased hardware. Through additional examples, he addresses costs and savings related to software licensing and disaster recovery/high availability, offering even deeper practical insight into the financial impact of cloud computing. Writing for business leaders and “in-the-trenches” managers, Williams outlines the impact of cloud computing on the IT supply chain by contrasting legacy processes and systems with cloud computing implementations. To simplify deployment, Williams presents easy-to-use tables, a decision-maker checklist, and a comprehensive collection of additional resources for further study. · Understand today’s leading cloud service and deployment models · Identify the major characteristics of cloud computing platforms · Use key performance/success indicators to measure IT performance and influence business strategies · Quantify the baseline costs of your current IT value chain · Use TCO, the payback method, ROI, NPV, and other metrics to justify cloud deployments · Calculate the total financial impact of migrating to “the cloud” · Place cloud computing in the historical context of technological revolutions · Recognize the long-term social and global benefits of cheap and ubiquitous computing This volume is in the Network Business Series offered by Cisco Press®. Books in this series provide IT executives, decision makers, and networking professionals with pertinent information about today’s most important technologies and business strategies.

This open access book brings together perspectives from multiple disciplines including psychology, law, IS, and computer science on data privacy and trust in the cloud. Cloud technology has fueled rapid, dramatic technological change, enabling a level of connectivity that has never been seen before in human history. However, this brave new world comes with problems. Several high-profile cases over the last few years have demonstrated cloud computing's uneasy relationship with data security and trust. This volume explores the numerous technological, process and regulatory solutions presented in academic literature as mechanisms for building trust in the cloud, including GDPR in Europe. The massive acceleration of digital adoption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic is introducing new and significant security and privacy threats and concerns. Against this backdrop, this book provides a timely reference and organising framework for considering how we will assure privacy and build trust in such a hyper-connected digitally dependent world. This book presents a framework for assurance and accountability in the cloud and reviews the literature on trust, data privacy and protection, and ethics in cloud computing.

The Internet of Things offers massive societal and economic opportunities while at the same time significant challenges, not least the delivery and management of the technical infrastructure underpinning it, the deluge of data generated from it, ensuring privacy and security, and capturing value from it. This Open Access Pivot explores these challenges, presenting the state of the art and future directions for research but also frameworks for making sense of this complex area. This book provides a variety of perspectives on how technology innovations such as fog, edge and dew computing, 5G networks, and distributed intelligence are making us rethink conventional cloud computing to support the Internet of Things. Much of this book focuses on technical aspects of the Internet of Things, however, clear methodologies for mapping the business value of the Internet of Things are still missing. We provide a value mapping framework for the Internet of Things to address this gap. While there is much hype about theInternet of Things, we have yet to reach the tipping point. As such, this book provides a timely entrée for higher education educators, researchers and students, industry and policy makers on the technologies that promise to reshape how society interacts and operates.

Exploring the Cloud Computing (CC) commercial landscape as it matures; this book asserts that the key ingredient in sustaining the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model is subscription renewal. Chronicling the evolution and future trajectory of the CC concept, the authors examine the new paradigm it is creating for the distribution of computer software applications among business-to-business (B2B) clients. CC enabled SaaS has been fundamentally changing the revenue expectations and business model for the application software industry, and impacting on how SaaS providers pursue, acquire and retain B2B clients. Securing SaaS subscription renewal is critical to the survival and prosperity of this business as attrition can have a significant impact on the financial viability of SaaS businesses based on this model. Focusing on the B2B client and the SaaS industry dependency on renewal subscriptions delivered through the CC channel, the primary research presented in this book seeks to examine the key drivers behind the B2B SaaS subscription renewal decision and, in doing so, to explore the recurring revenue framework for the Cloud SaaS business.

See how the principles of Service Science govern the dynamics driving the adoption of cloud computing in the industry. Cloud as Service shows you how the evolution of enterprise computing platforms to application-specific cloud platforms (ASCPs) have aligned to business needs. You'll also learn processes for developing and building ASCPs. You'll gain insight into how executives, managers, and technologists are utilizing cloud services, cloud service providers, equipment manufacturers, and software and application vendors participating in cloud supply chains. For business, the appeal of cloud computing must go beyond the notion of convenient, on-demand access of networked pooled access to computing resources. Industry leaders have learned to apply cloud computing to become more nimble, cost effective, and customer engaging as they strive for competitive advantage, regardless of size. These companies define and build cloud platforms customized for their needs rather than using someone else’s. This book shows you how to use a holistic, end-to-end view of platform planning, platform development, supply chains and operations to collapse platform development times to a fraction of the original time. You’ll see that strategies for selling to the cloud market are essentially incomplete; and that in order to be successful, businesses must become cloud service businesses themselves, incorporating cloud technologies in their engineering, IT, sales and marketing, and delivery processes. What You'll Learn: Historical perspective to provide insight into the dynamics driving cloud evolution today State of the art in IT requirements and cloud solutions The value of User Experience (UX) driven design principles The crucial roles of Service Brokers and Service Assurance Managers The landscape of emerging cloud services and what they mean to your enterprise Service Portals and Enterprise Service Buses Who This Book Is For: CIOs, CTOs, data center architects, solution architects and application engineers Educational institutions building a systems integration curriculum Developers who want to understand how their work fits in the cloud ecosystem

This book combines the three dimensions of technology, society and economy to explore the advent of today’s cloud ecosystems as successors to older service ecosystems based on networks. Further, it describes the shifting of services to the cloud as a long-term trend that is still progressing rapidly.The book adopts a comprehensive perspective on the key success factors for the technology – compelling business models and ecosystems including private, public and national organizations. The authors explore the evolution of service ecosystems, describe the similarities and differences, and analyze the way they have created and changed industries. Lastly, based on the current status of cloud computing and related technologies like virtualization, the internet of things, fog computing, big data and analytics, cognitive computing and blockchain, the authors provide a revealing outlook on the possibilities of future technologies, the future of the internet, and the potential impacts on business and society.

The IT sector is full of hype. But once in a while there is a genuine inflection point, a moment at which the way of doing things fundamentally changes due to the introduction of new technologies. The rise of cloud computing is just such an inflection point. Cloud computing is the next stage of the Internet computing model, one in which organizations will consume services, not technologies. These services will be ready to run, available outside the office walls, and be paid for on the basis of usage, just like water or electricity. As the cloud and services model matures, not only will businesses be able to solve old problems more inexpensively and rapidly, they will also be able to address new challenges that were previously out of reach. Cloud computing promises a more flexible “services” model for IT systems that puts the business unit or end user at the center of the process. In this way, both the IT organization and the business itself become more agile. At the same time, cloud computing promises to reduce the delivered cost of IT through a greater degree of resource utilization, automation, and self service. This will not happen overnight. It will not be next year, nor even within a year or two. But as time passes, more and more companies will find themselves in a position to be able to source services wherever they like: inside the organization or from any provider, whether it be Google, IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon, T-Systems or any other cloud computing vendor. This book is a comprehensive introduction to cloud computing and its most prominent enabling technology: virtualization. In the first part, you are guided through the visions, concept and models behind cloud computing. You will learn how your organization can profit from cloud-enabling technologies and how you can incorporate them in your IT infrastructure. Part II of this book consists of “Industry Outlooks”: in depth articles from industry experts. Part III offers a series of useful case stories, covering a broad diversity of virtualization and cloud-related issues. Further to the development of this book, the development team that is responsible for the content of this book, has developed a certification program on Cloud computing, the Cloud Certification Program. This vendor-neutral Cloud Certification Program provides professionals with the opportunity to obtain globally recognized credentials in cloud computing. The CompTIA Cloud Essentials course Exam is intended for IT professionals who wish to certify that they have the required knowledge and understanding required to complete and pass the CompTIA Cloud Essentials™ Exam on cloud computing. Anyone who passes this exam to obtains the CompTIA Cloud Essentials™ Professional certificate.