Towards a Quantitative Model of Cloud Computing Risks and Benefits

Migrating to the cloud is the main direction of enterprise IT optimization today. Many research papers confirm that cloud computing provides economic benefits, because it enhances flexibility and reduces costs. In other studies, cloud-specific risks are identified and their impact on the customer business is evaluated. However, most often, benefits and risks are considered separately. Model that allows simultaneously evaluate these factors is proposed here. Key factors of tangible and intangible benefits and risks are identified that allows to estimate joint impact of costs and risks on cloud adoption. Simple rules that help to quantify these factors and compute consistent pairwise comparison matrices are also proposed. Usage of proposed method is demonstrated with simple example.Migrating to the cloud is the main direction of enterprise IT optimization today. Many research papers confirm that cloud computing provides economic benefits, because it enhances flexibility and reduces costs. In other studies, cloud-specific risks are identified and their impact on the customer business is evaluated. However, most often, benefits and risks are considered separately. Model that allows simultaneously evaluate these factors is proposed here. Key factors of tangible and intangible benefits and risks are identified that allows to estimate joint impact of costs and risks on cloud adoption. Simple rules that help to quantify these factors and compute consistent pairwise comparison matrices are also proposed. Usage of proposed method is demonstrated with simple example