IT managers at enterprises of all sizes are exploring cloud computing and virtualization as a way to address conflicting demands within their organizations. These mounting pressures include a lack of internal resources, mandates from the CFO to lower costs, and the struggle to complete key initiatives while also performing mundane server maintenance and application storage tasks. These same IT professionals are also being asked to build and implement battle-tested disaster recovery and business continuity plans that not only reduce data loss and downtime, but present a recovery time objective that prevents the organization from further interruption in the wake of an outage.
You may have read some controversial articles in the early days of cloud computing stating that there is no such thing as ROI for cloud computing. These early cloud pundits believed that buying into cloud services is not an investment, but an avoidance in an investment – therefore, ROI cannot be measured.