Cloud TCO

From CloudWiki

Do Clouds Compute? A Framework for Estimating the Value of Cloud Computing

Abstract

On-demand provisioning of scalable and reliable compute services, along with a cost model that charges consumers based on actual service usage, has been an objective in distributed computing research and industry for a while. Cloud computing promises to deliver on this objective: building on compute and storage virtualization technologies, consumers are able to rent infrastructure "in the Cloud" as needed, deploy applications and store data, and access them via Web protocols on a pay-per-use basis.

The acceptance of cloud computing depends on the ability to implement a model for value co-creation. Therefore, a systematic, dedicated approach to measure the benefit from cloud computing is urgently needed. Previous work from related fields does not consider all aspects relevant to cloud computing and can thus not be directly applied. In this paper, we discuss the need for valuation of cloud computing, identify key components, and structure these components in a framework. The framework assists decision makers in estimating Cloud Computing costs and to compare these costs to conventional IT solutions. With representative use cases we discuss how our framework may be applied to real world scenarios.

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