Cloud Computing’s ROI Increasingly Elusive, Survey Finds

February 19, 2013 Off By David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

As cloud computing sweeps through organizations, executives’ confidence that they can effectively deploy it and measure its results is waning. That’s the finding of a new survey conducted by The Open Group, an industry consortium. In 2011, the association reports, 55 percent of those surveyed felt that cloud return on investment (ROI) would be easy to evaluate and justify, although only 35 percent had mechanisms in place to do it. In the latest survey conducted at the end of 2012, the proportion that thought it would be easy had gone down to 44 percent, and only 20 percent had mechanisms in place.

Perhaps it’s a result of cloud becoming so tightly interwoven with the business that the potential results may be more far-reaching than a single process or two. Or, perhaps, cloud adoption and usage is expanding deeper into business operations at a faster pace than can be measured. In fact, the survey also finds that the types of metrics being employed are expanding beyond simple cost reductions. While cost continues to be the primary cloud ROI metric, there has been a surge in adoption of quality of delivered results and speed of operation, and utilization of resources as metrics as well…

HP’s E.G. Nadhan, also active with The Open Group, has been pondering the cloud ROI question for some time, and concludes that what once were sporadic IT costs have become a part of a continuous evaluation process — which may make capturing ROI measurements a trickier proposition. “We need to track the cost of cloud and the returns realized on a continuous basis in order to be effective cloud consumers realizing business value for our shareholders,” he says…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2013/02/18/cloud-computings-roi-increasingly-elusive-survey-finds/