The Maturing View Of Cloud Computing
Our latest survey on cloud computing deals with return on investment (the full report will be out this summer). In many ways, thinking about ROI of any new technology forces decision makers to cut through both their own hype and the stuff vendors manufacture to take a studied look at benefits and risks.
It’s one thing to echo back the desires of line-of-business adherents in pursuit of new investment; it’s a far different thing to haul out a spreadsheet in front of the CEO and CFO and claim that you have a handle on the real financial impact of a new technology.
Through all of our surveys on cloud computing, we’ve seen both excitement and skepticism from IT pros, executives, and line-of-business managers alike, but this was the first survey where both the responses and free-form comments showed the sort of pragmatism that IT professionals usually show toward new technologies.
For instance, practically gone is the notion of calculating a one-year ROI. IT pros realize that, for better or worse, moving to software as a service and other cloud services means moving from a model that requires large capex outlays followed by much smaller opex ones to a model that calls for almost no capex but regular, larger opex.
That means that what looks like a good deal in years one and two won’t look as good in years four and five. In fact, unless the application itself changes, the total cost of moving an application to a service provider will usually increase the overall cost of the application over the long run.
