Cloud ROI: Why It’s Still Hard To Measure

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

When it comes to judging the true cost of cloud computing, many companies try to break down the cost of running their own on-premises data center and compare that with the cost of using Amazon’s or Microsoft’s cloud. At Airbnb, Dave Augustine doesn’t really have time for all that.

The six-year-old Web company has never had its own data center. Airbnb launched its service, which matches travelers with people looking to rent out a room or other accommodation, using the Amazon cloud, and its developers still build all their applications for Amazon’s EC2. Having more than one cloud infrastructure provider, says Augustine, Airbnb’s manager of site reliability engineering, "is an interesting idea" he might look at someday — perhaps after Airbnb doubles its bookings again. As for determining his company’s return on investment on Amazon services, Augustine calls that "penny-pinching."…

Augustine and Airbnb land in the minority of respondents to this year’s InformationWeek Cloud ROI Survey — the 20% of companies that don’t calculate ROI for their cloud projects. The other 80% of the 339 companies using or evaluating cloud computing say they’re highly to somewhat likely to calculate ROI for cloud projects. "Right now, we have better things to do," Augustine says…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/cloud-roi-why-its-still-hard-to-measure—/d/d-id/1297746