Justifying Your Cloud Investment: Web Sites

It's one thing to say infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals need to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing; it's quite another to justify the financial and resource commitments. This requires a business case that validates the investment on grounds of business empowerment, cost savings, or faster time-to-market. Positive return on investment (ROI) from cloud computing can't be achieved as a blanket business case because the benefits of cloud computing vary based on the application use case. This report examines the case for deploying Web sites onto an IaaS cloud computing environment. Agility is a common cloud advantage, and this translates into faster time-to-resources for application development and operations professionals. But business justification only comes from ensuring the right fit between the applications and the cloud service, and the right IT ops protections and processes.