Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step ...

CHAPTER 4
Making the Business
Case for Clouds
Chapter 4
Money is better than poverty,
if only for financial reasons.
—Woody Allen (1935–)
You might think that cloud computing would always be
more cost effective than on-premise computing. However,
the value that cloud computing brings to your enterprise
depends on many variables and dynamics of your business.
Therefore, like anything that means change, you need
to work the business case first to see the ultimate worth of
this approach.
The forces at work here include strategic and tactical
issues that should be analyzed, including the ability to
shift risk to cloud computing providers, the ability to drive
down operating costs, the ability to fix inefficiencies within
the existing architecture, and the value all of that brings.
The problem is that most enterprises do not analyze these
business opportunities holistically and thus make many
mistakes when building the larger business case. If we’re
going to be honest about it, enterprise architects are notoriously
bad at creating business cases.
The purpose of this chapter is to bring a bit of business
sense to cloud computing and examine its effect on enterprise
IT, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. This is
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