Productivity: Cloud’s Silver Lining?

Cloud computing. You’ll come for the cost savings, but stay for the productivity payoffs.  That’s what many users are finding as they gain experience with cloud infrastructure and software as a service (SaaS).

The benefits of being able to deploy software and bring users up to speed quickly, as well as the sheer variety of productive applications that are available as low-cost SaaS services, are dwarfing the infrastructure savings that drew many IT managers toward the cloud in the first place.  Productivity can be a slippery factor to measure, but it’s important in ROI considerations. Here are some factors to examine:…

 

Provisioning speed – I wrote earlier about how to estimate the true cost of a server. There are also costs related to provisioning technology that directly impact productivity. Start by asking server administrators how many person-hours are typically consumed to provision a physical or virtual server. Using hourly costs, estimate the time spent on this task that could otherwise be used more productively. Take the average cost and multiply it by the average number of servers you provision in a week or month. Compare to the time required to provision cloud servers, which often come with extensive scripting and automation. Comparing the two will show you how much productive value the cloud delivers…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cio.com/article/3005091/cloud-computing/productivity-cloud-s-silver-lining.html