Measuring ROI in the cloud by comparing revenues against costs doesn´t tell the whole story about how much your company could be benefitting from cloud computing. When you factor in our nine things to consider when measuring ROI in the cloud, you could be pleasantly surprised.
1. Lower Hardware Maintenance and Refresh Costs
Unless your business is a cloud-based start-up that never had an on-premises infrastructure, you will likely be aware of the costs associated with hardware. They are not going to disappear overnight; but, as you migrate workloads to the cloud, the costs of maintaining and refreshing hardware gradually diminish. It is also less likely your business will experience downtime from server failures.
2. Provisioning Only What You Require
One of the great benefits of cloud computing is that you only provision what you require. This means that, rather than purchasing a server with 3TB of storage capacity when you only need to store 500GB of data, you can provision 500GB of data storage in the cloud – saving money and eliminating excess capacity. This factor is commonly overlooked when measuring ROI in the cloud.
3. The Cloud Facilitates Incremental Growth
Similarly, when you have an on-premises infrastructure, you are unable to scale incrementally. When an on-premises server has reached capacity, you need to add another server even if it is for one or two additional users. In the cloud, you can again save money and eliminate excess capacity by adding (or removing) users incrementally as your needs change.
4. Access to the Latest Cloud Technologies
In recent years, there has been a massive advance in cloud technologies that give businesses operating in the cloud a massive advantage over on-premises competitors. Without access to (or a significant investment in) technologies such as IoT analytics, machine learning, and edge computing, businesses can find it difficult keep pace with competitors and plan ahead with confidence.
5. Improved Collaboration and Productivity
Operating in an interconnected cloud environment can improve the ways in which users collaborate, which in turn improves productivity. This is especially true when a business is spread over multiple locations or when representatives from different Lines of Business work together in a Cloud Center of Excellence to govern the existing environment and develop strategies for future projects.
6. More Focus on Business Strategy
Operating in a cloud environment means that businesses need to enforce governance policies more effectively than in on-premises environments. Although developing and enforcing governance policies can increase the management overhead, the payback is that processes run smoother. When measuring ROI in the cloud, the increased focus on business strategy is a likely reason for increased profitability.
7. Better Security in the Cloud
Most concerns about security in the cloud are not attributable to Cloud Service Provider´s data centers being insecure, but rather a misunderstanding of the shared responsibility model. Once the shared responsibility model is understood and applied, businesses can spend less time and money addressing security concerns and further increase the ROI from cloud computing.
8. Redundancy and Disaster Recovery
Unless you specifically deploy resources in a single availability zone, your business will benefit from having multiple copies of data of the Cloud Service Provider´s servers if an outage ever occurs. Similarly, should a disaster occur, being able to recover data with the click of a mouse will enable your business to recover faster and minimize business disruption.
9. Save on Power and Cooling
Cloud Service Providers benefit from economies of scale that cannot be matched by most businesses, and use the latest technologies to power and cool their data centers. This means that not only are you saving money on power and cooling when you migrate workloads to the cloud, you are also reducing your carbon footprint – which may be a factor when measuring ROI in the cloud in years to come!
Measuring ROI in the Cloud Effectively with CloudHealth
The CloudHealth cloud management platform gives businesses totally visibility into cloud environments to identify where costs are being consumed and where opportunities exist to increase revenues. The platform also has advanced reporting capabilities individual business units can use to acquire unique perspectives that align with their needs.
To find out more about how you can use CloudHealth to more accurately measure ROI in the cloud, do not hesitate to contact us. Our team of cloud experts will be happy to talk you through CloudHealth´s capabilities or organize a free demo of our platform in action. The opportunity also exists to take a free trial of CloudHealth in order to evaluate its capabilities in your own environment.
