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How Do You Prove Cloud ROI? IT Performance Systems Help

Michael Procopio

I saw a survey in an interesting article the other day by ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick. McKendrick cites a new cloud survey for The Open Group. The survey indicated that many believe cloud will bring favorable ROI to IT shops, but they lack a mechanism to track results.

ROI is a purely financial calculation which is usually expressed as dollar amount or a percentage. The catch is many IT shops don’t know what a project or a service costs. If you don’t know how much you will invest to get to cloud and how much cost you will take out by doing it (return), ROI will stay illusive.

Cloud computing is predicted by many to be a fundamental shift in the way IT works. As more public cloud applications become available, which are nicely prices on a per user per month basis – IT management is going to need to have the same information and more.

Good or bad, the per user per month metric is not the only consideration your company has of you if it matches most of those surveyed. Agility, innovation, business alignment and more are being asked of IT management. All these are hard to measure now. Cloud adds more moving parts which rarely makes things easier.

What to do? Start now creating your own IT Performance system. How, starting thinking about all the KPIs (key performance indicators) you wish you had that can be derived from data that exists somewhere in the organization.
Here are some examples:

*  % of Service Performance Not Met
*  MTBF (mean time between failure)
*  MTTR (mean time to repair)
*  Time-To-Market of New IT Products or Services (from the time there is agreement we will do project zebra to the time IT says the zebra is ready for production)

The way you will prove ROI is seeing improvement in these (and other) measures after moving to cloud.

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How Do You Prove Cloud ROI? IT Performance Systems Help

Michael Procopio

I saw a survey in an interesting article the other day by ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick. McKendrick cites a new cloud survey for The Open Group. The survey indicated that many believe cloud will bring favorable ROI to IT shops, but they lack a mechanism to track results.

ROI is a purely financial calculation which is usually expressed as dollar amount or a percentage. The catch is many IT shops don’t know what a project or a service costs. If you don’t know how much you will invest to get to cloud and how much cost you will take out by doing it (return), ROI will stay illusive.

Cloud computing is predicted by many to be a fundamental shift in the way IT works. As more public cloud applications become available, which are nicely prices on a per user per month basis – IT management is going to need to have the same information and more.

Good or bad, the per user per month metric is not the only consideration your company has of you if it matches most of those surveyed. Agility, innovation, business alignment and more are being asked of IT management. All these are hard to measure now. Cloud adds more moving parts which rarely makes things easier.

What to do? Start now creating your own IT Performance system. How, starting thinking about all the KPIs (key performance indicators) you wish you had that can be derived from data that exists somewhere in the organization.
Here are some examples:

*  % of Service Performance Not Met
*  MTBF (mean time between failure)
*  MTTR (mean time to repair)
*  Time-To-Market of New IT Products or Services (from the time there is agreement we will do project zebra to the time IT says the zebra is ready for production)

The way you will prove ROI is seeing improvement in these (and other) measures after moving to cloud.

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In the final part of APMdigest's 2025 Predictions Series, industry experts offer predictions on how AI will evolve and impact technology and business in 2025 ...

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

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The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

Image
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Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...