EFFECTIVE EVALUATION OF CLOUD COMPUTING INVESTMENT – APPLICATION OF COST BENEFIT METHOD ANALYSIS

Use of information and communication technologies both into enterprises and state administration is a great step towards increasing productivity and therefore, economic competitiveness. One of currently ever-spreading technologies is cloud computing. Transfer from the current infrastructure to cloud computing one is risky and expensive matter. The main question when considering cloud computing employment is the investment’s effectiveness and return on investment. The aim of this contribution is to present a model and web application for cloud computing investments evaluation, which will allow customers to answer the main question whether migration from current IT infrastructure to cloud method is suitable or not. The model specifies return on investment based on chosen economic indicators as well as suitability of the solution in regard to characteristics and chosen aspects of company management. Among the main methods used during the model development are multi-criteria variant analysis, quantitative analysis by professional discussions while assembling the model, verification of the initial model with companies, its modification, and application development. The model is based on Cost Benefit Analysis method, and therefore it allows for considering qualitative variables, by which it significantly differs from the existing web calculators for cloud method cost calculations. Furthermore, the developed application is vendor independent and it is based on the following principles: requirement of inputs that take into account the specifics of companies, scalability and complexity in the form of static and dynamic economic indicators and includes sensitivity analysis and thus enables recalculate the result and based on a certain % change of input parameters.