Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
performance factors and functional expenses
(McRitsie et.al., 2008). Physical attributes, that
may affect the in-source development, are related
to the operating environment such as facility re-
quirements, systems hardware and software costs
and end users equipment. Performance attributes
involve the technical non-functional requirements
of the application relevant to the required reli-
ability, transaction- rate, safety, accuracy. The
non-functional requirements have an impact on
the selected infrastructure. Finally the functional
expenses of the company may involve years of
operation, labor rates, size of the development
and support team and replacement and upgrade
policies.
These factors affect the total cost of an IT in-
vestment and may define the feasibility of a certain
application development and the potential benefits
of developing it in-sourcing or out-sourcing over
the cloud.
This chapter is an overview of possible billing
measures and metrics related to infrastructure and
software either they are deployed in the cloud or
in house. It is addressed to IT managers that face
the dilemma of selecting to deploy applications
on the cloud or on premise, to cloud providers
that want to effectively bill their provisions and
to Independent Service Vendors that want to offer
to potential customers both of the two alterna-
tives, clarifying long term benefits of each of the
two. Specifically, in the sequel we pursue three
main goals:
based using commercial data from software
development coming from the International
Standards Benchmarking Group (ISBSG,
2010) and from (Yankee, 2005) report.
c. to define quality attributes and levels of
demand behaviour that may affect the final
choice. User demand is an indicator of the
load of a system and the estimated traffic that
greatly affects infrastructure costs. Desired
quality attributes and the level these attri-
butes are incorporated into on premise and
on cloud solutions can also affect the final
decision.
The rest of the chapter is organized as follows:
The next Section provides an analysis of the
background and the related work. Section entitled
“Choose the right deployment model” describes
cloud computing and traditional software and
system costs and provides a three step procedure
that will assist IT managers to understand the
benefits of each solution. The two last sections
discuss future work and conclude the Chapter.
BACKGROUND
Τhere is fairly broad general interest on the benefits
and drawbacks of moving or deploying an applica-
tion to the cloud. Cost is recognized as an important
factor that may motivate the transitioning of IT
operations to cloud computing. Practitioners show
an increased interest on the costs related to cloud
computing however monetary cost- benefits are
not yet fully recorded, assessed and analyzed by
the scientific community.
Armbrust et. al. (2009) in their technical
report, include a chapter devoted to cloud com-
puting economics. Three issues are mentioned in
(Armbrust et al., 2009) that should participate in
cloud computing economic models. These issues
are related to long-term cost benefits, hardware
resource costs declines and resource utilization.
A host service in the cloud should offer benefits
a. to analyze the different types of costs related
to adopting cloud technologies and in house
development. Our approach is based on the
discussion of general cost categories that
are taken into account by “cloud” providers
and the traditional cost drivers considered in
estimating in-source software and systems
applications;
b. to provide an analytic comparison example
for the deployment of a CRM system based
on current economic status. The analysis is
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