Many clients come to Athena Cloud looking to save costs on their IT infrastructure. They understand the benefits of cloud computing and how it can significantly reduce capital expenses and investments in on-premise hardware and provide greater security and accessibility. Before consuming cloud services, an organization will typically perform an ROI exercise to measure CAPEX vs. OPEX and illustrate the cost savings that would occur by moving their applications or data to the cloud. It’s a simple exercise that measures the immediate value cloud computing will bring to an organization and becomes an important reason why so many organizations have turned to cloud services to power their business.
However, a more practical approach to calculating cloud ROI is gaining steam. According to a recent report by ISACA: How Enterprises Are Calculating Cloud ROI is proving to be more valuable. That approach is agility-based ROI, where organizations are placing greater value on how agile their business will become by implementing cloud services and measuring the long-term benefits. But the definition and importance of agility can vary significantly from organization to organization depending on their business and vertical. Whether that is increasing time-to-market, enhancing products on the fly, or responding to market conditions quicker, cloud services enable organizations to adapt without losing momentum quickly. It also offers greater long-term flexibility allowing them to progress and innovate more rapidly.
Cloud Agility Offers Greater Scalability
Increased agility offers many operational advantages to an organization, such as enabling them to scale their services up or down whenever they need to, provisioning infrastructure in minutes rather than months, and quickly bringing new products to market without incurring large capital costs. Organizations can dramatically reduce product experimentation costs while reducing risk, enabling them to further reduce their time-to-market for new products, features, and enhancements.
How to Measure Agility-based Cloud ROI
The only issue with agility-based cloud ROI is that measuring it is quite complicated and starts by understanding the agility an organization will gain by implementing cloud architecture. The process begins by analyzing the organization’s behaviours and metrics over time and taking a deeper dive into the measurements that matter. An MSP can help with this task in the initial architecture design phase as they consider TCO and the value and agility cloud computing will bring to the organization.
Organizations need to understand the entire cost structure of implementing a cloud solution while also considering the increased agility cloud architecture provides. Although clients are initially attracted to cloud services by the cost savings it offers, they ultimately stay for the added agility their organization will gain from the solution.
Contact us to learn more about how the cloud can increase your business agility.