Business benefits

Many have cited cost savings as the primary benefit associated with cloud computing. While this can prove true, CFOs like you should know and understand the other benefits cloud offers, beyond simply reducing costs. The speed, agility, flexibility and scalability cloud offers can help you better serve current and future business demands and become more competitive without the large upfront technology costs typically required by traditional IT investment.

Education

Business Benefits of Cloud: It's more than just costs: PDF 556 KB Gartner: The Benefits of Cloud: Video 05:19 CFO.com: Cloud Control: Article CFO.com: Can Cloud Computing Clean the Air? : Article

Questions to consider

What elements of your business strategy for growth or operational improvement could most benefit from cloud? Will it be the speed of deployment, flexible operation, reduced-capital outlay or other identified benefits that will?

Do you have a clear assessment from your CIO about the costs and operational performance associated with legacy systems and applications being run in your data centers today?

Is there an upgrade path mapped out that will help reduce the costs and improve performance? Does this plan have an associated financial roadmap?

Best Practices

“ Subsequently our ability to provide customers with an agile and dynamic cloud offer that scales up and down with their demands is vital. We created a cost-effective cloud solution called Elastic ComputePlatform that allows us to rapidly scale without affecting resources. For our customers, this negates the need for capital outlay, and the customer pays only for what they use.”

“ The speed, agility and scalability cloud offers has significantly reduced our time to market. Traditionally, in an emerging market, it could take up to 18 months to get all the systems and processes in place before we could effectively provide consumable infrastructure or application services to our customers. With cloud, we're able to virtually have this available on day one and scale with demand on an as needed basis. The speed of which we're able to provide new services has given us a competitive advantage while the flexibility cloud offers ensures we only pay for only what is needed, reducing our overall costs.”