Gauging Cloud Potential in an Enterprise Landscape

Enterprises are investigating how they can benefit from the increasing availability of cloud technologies. As many business capabilities are already supported by IT, the priority is identification of business capabilities with supporting IT that would be a potential beneficiary of moving to cloud-based solutions. This paper introduces a heuristic methodology which identifies cloud-compatible business capabilities and cloud-candidate applications. It is a KPI-based step-by-step approach in which the different service models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) are considered. A first assessment pass identifies the business capabilities potentially benefiting from the cloud. A second pass examines and evaluates the currently existing or planned applications delivering functionality for these business capabilities to find cloud deployment candidates. Several dimensions like business acceptance, compliance requirements or data security aspects are taken into account when assessing if an application is a " good " cloud-candidate or not.