A cloud business case involves thorough planning and analysis to justify the investment in cloud services. It takes into account the end to end benefits and expenses to ensure that the organizations can take an informed decision on what is beneficial for them before moving to cloud. Here’s a step-by-step guide, including key factors to consider and methods to measure effectiveness, followed by an example:
1. Define objectives and scope
- Objectives: Business / Technical
- Scope: Define the scope of migration, which applications, or services will be migrated.
2. Assess Current Environment
- Inventory: Assess the inventory in terms of hardwares, softwares, and existing network infrastructure.
- Performance Metrics: Gather performance metrics of current systems to establish baselines.
- Total Costs of Optimization: Calculate the total cost of ownership of the current environment including hardware, software, maintenance and personnel costs.
3. Evaluate Cloud Options
- Provider Selection: Choose the provider amongst Specialized providers and Market leaders like Azure, AWS, Google Service Provider etc. based on pricing and support.
- Service Models: Choose between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS based on your needs.
- Deployment Models: Decide between public, private, hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
4. Cost Analysis
- Operational Costs
- Migration Costs: Estimate costs assosciated with migarting to cloud including migration costs, data transfer, re-architecting applications and tarining staff.
- Comparison
5. Benefit Analysis
- Cost Savings
- Performance
- Scalability
- Security and Compliance
6. Risk Assessment
- Migrational Risks
- Operational Risks
- Mitigation Strategies
7. Implementation Plan
- Phased Approach
- Timelines
- Resources
8. Measuring Effectiveness
- Key Performance Indicators
- Regular Reviews
- Feedback Loop
