Cloud Business Case: Identify the Scale Problem first...

...And better, if you already have one.

The very reason Cloud has evolved, is out of the need to scale the Business. For Amazon, Cloud was not the end-goal. AWS came as an evolutionary choice as they started to scale up. It made sense to them to build the highly reusable and automated web services they needed to ship the projects faster, release the features frequently and manage the customer adoption growth. In the process Amazon invented the business model a.k.a. IaaS, which they could monetize.

Among all the technology choices available for financial services firms, Cloud is a key contender as a "must-adopt" technology today. It is very likely that most of the Financial Institutions have at least one or two workloads already running in the cloud. However there is still a lot of ambiguity to determine how to make sense out of the Cloud Economics - Whether it will would make sense economically to adopt the cloud? How to determine the true costs to move from hosted infrastructure to Cloud? How to right size the workloads? How to move away from the servers which are already bolted in the racks?

While some of the "costs" can be estimated there are many other "value" dimensions which are hard to quantify to come up with a viable commercial decision point. And because it is hard to quantify, most of these value dimensions are not taken into consideration.

In order to capture the "Value" dimension, I believe it would make sense to Identify the "Scale" problems similar to what Amazon did. What are the bottlenecks which are holding your Business to scale up - Ability to launch new propositions and experiences to engage with customers OR Slack in meeting the internal project schedules?

Once the scale deterrents are established, it will be easier to deal with the 'value' and 'cost' dimensions to harness the full benefit of cloud.

Following are typical symptoms of "Scale" limiters:

• Ability to launch the new business propositions/services without committing the underlying fixed IT infrastructure.
• Potential to expand the business geographically, but setting up the underlying IT infrastructure is bound to take years.
• Applications are experiencing increased traffic and it’s becoming difficult to scale resources on the fly to meet the increasing demand.
• IT Operational costs are high constrained by ineffective IT processes.
• Application implementation and deployments are slow and in waiting queue to provision the in-house Infrastructure.
• Difficult and expensive to keep up with growing storage needs.
• Build a widely distributed development team to attract the top talent. practically impossible to assemble all talent under one roof.
• Setting up a Disaster Recovery system and setting it up for an entire data center could double the cost.
• Tracking and upgrading underlying server software is a cost and time consuming process. In most of the cases internal infrastructure have a considerable backlog of updates.