Cloud Business Case: A View from the Field

If you're anywhere close to enterprise IT, you've probably heard about cloud computing. The Cloud is being presented as the Next Big Thing in aligning IT with business, achieving rapid return on investment and moving capital expenditure to operating expenditure. It may appear to be merely the new outsourcing but it avoids the inflexibly of long contracts and is driving new types of behaviour on behalf of service providers and opportunities for businesses.

Businesses are being driven toward the Cloud because they are at an inflection point where a new approach to IT is being mandated, one that cleaves to business requirements, is highly flexible, very cost- effective and supports rather than blocks tactical and strategic changes to business. Cloud is also being held up as the answer to many traditional IT woes: slow and unresponsive systems; technology as an impediment to mergers and acquisitions (or demergers and spin-out plans); and IT as an expensive and variable source of costs.

Cloud has much to recommend it but how do you go about developing a solid business case for its adoption? This short paper considers some of the options being used by enterprises working with Microsoft's Enterprise Strategy practice.

Click the link below to read the full white paper.