Every IT leader has faced it, the initial ‘ask’ to the chief financial officer for technology money or funding. As cloud computing has taken off, many of those ‘asks’ have included money for cloud services. Ellen Messmer reports for Network World that the ISACA, a membership organization for IT security and audit professionals, has recently published a Cloud ROI (return on investment) guide.
The ISASCA formula is:
ROI = (Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment
An important piece to the Cloud ROI calculation is determining the “Gain from Investment”. This variable could include savings from infrastructure or maintenance personnel changes from moving to the cloud service or new revenue opportunities. Experts agree that IT professionals should keep business unit managers plugged in to cloud computing discussions and options.
The ISACA Cloud ROI guide also includes a list of likely expenditures with a cloud computing deployment and has a section on “business challenges” where it looks at some of the issues that may or may not come with a cloud service. The guide covers infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) as well as private, public and hybrid clouds.
