Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Summary

Most company and application can benefit from the cloud in different ways. Although there are many different compelling cases for clouds, there also are a variety of use cases where clouds may not be the best solution.

The economics of some of these solution types is not as simple as basic cost reduction or revenue growth. For example, a particular cloud service may embed a particular competency. This competency may be binary—the cloud provider has it and the customer doesn’t—or graduated—a cloud provider can do something somewhat better or faster than the customer can with its own resources.

Trade-offs exist in some circumstances. For example, hub-and-spoke networks for transport or communications are more cost effective than point-to-point networks but tend to increase latency, as anyone who’s waited in an airport for a connecting flight knows.

The list provided in this chapter is no doubt incomplete, as new applications and scenarios are being developed all the time. However, it serves to illustrate the power of the cloud to generate benefits in accordance with multiple canonical scenarios.