Internap was privileged to recently host a cloud roundtable with three IT executives, including Tim Bell, VP, Information Technology & CIO of Greenway Medical, Raymond A. Repic, VP of Information Technology at Dell SecureWorks, as well as Michael J. Smith, Executive Director of NASA Shared Services Center. During this discussion, we heard how these leaders steer their own cloud implementations and the lessons they learned along the way. Tim Bell gave us the following insights when asked about deriving ROI from his cloud implementation.
We looked at the cloud in two parts: a platform for our software and services, and the other as a platform to serve the needs and requirements of the company.
The most important thing we found is to integrate cloud concepts early in the product development cycle. While this is a new concept by nomenclature, the technologies and the system infrastructures behind cloud computing have been evolving over several years under various names. We began to recognize we wanted to leverage this delivery mechanism, so it had to be integrated into the product development stage. Rather than having to re-tool, we can roll out new products and offerings that are based on that concept without a disruption of our whole product and services delivery timeline.
Secondly when talking about ROI for the delivery of services to the company, to get the returns we were looking for we needed to spread our deployment across the entire cloud deployment spectrum. We couldn’t take everything and put it into a Software as a Service (SaaS) model because it was cost prohibitive and it didn’t make sense for us to take our IT services and roll them to one place. So we began to look all three tiers of cloud services [Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and SaaS] to deliver the solutions we needed for the company to operate. That allows us to spread out the risks and costs and to learn more about the different tiers as we roll out more critical services.
For more on assessing cloud risks, deriving positive ROI and overcoming barriers to the cloud, listen to the webinar instant replay
What about you? Have you developed a method to derive ROI from your cloud implementations?
